





The N tee 


+ Fax aces Ameri Ca 


| Second Edition 
a With New For re a 


"HERBERT J. SELIGMANN 





EV 
61.046 


“R FLOAR 
ct LIBRARY =e 
WAR 22 1972° 
i“ BINDERS 
SLIPSBURG, Fy 







Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/negrofacesamericOOseli_0 





THE NEG RO. 
FACES AMERICA 


By, Uf 
HERBERT J. SELIGMANN 
Formerly Me aig of the ie ae ffs 


of The New York Even 
and The New Repu blip 


Press or CLARENCE 8S. NATHAN. Inc, 
NEW YORK 


Ture Negro Faces AmmriIca 


Copyright 1920, by Herbert J. Seligmann 
Printed in the United States of America 
First printing, 1920 

Second printing, 1924 
Press of Clarence S. Nathan, Inc.. New York 


CONTENTS 


Tue Burnp Spor 

Way Race Riots? 

THE Sourn’s Conor PsycHosis . 
ANTHROPOLOGY AND Myta . 
Certain Errects or War . 


Tue Scapegoat or Crry Po.urrics . 


THe Necro In INDUSTRY 

THe AmMeErIcan ConGco 

“SocraL EQuaLity” AND SEX . 
Top New Necro. ....- - 
APPENDIX Goo} 5 cc ui cmisiel st atheetc ts 

















pan» tem ey i 
: oh a | 
» on) ; 
Bea he 4a 1 tee 
I at EL Ue ED Vee 
: UE Poe? Sarg? hs 
s my] > Fe a ot ie y, TUB ae! 
bet 4 LiF ng 7" i " ; ati 
i . thee he, Te as Sh is Thies Whe 
d ‘en C42) eee hc. i bi, 
i> A ean 
} HA 
a nye ay 
a Hs 
t 
¥ i 
; 
4 
‘ 
\ ' 
' < ' 
' 
ety 
‘ 
: 
, ApS v 
) 
4,' et 
i 
{ 
‘ 
i 
P 
ia 
‘ 
rl 
u 
ky 
~ 
, i 
‘ f 
Fs 4 Ah 
i 
hey 
t 
i 
i4 
‘ » 
\ t * 
car 
ats j i" { 
, inf are 
1 
is 
, 
ve ie ’ 
4 
fj 
- 
’, P fi! 
wig od ‘ it 
yeas 7 Lele 
\ 


FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION 


Deprive the Negro of his political rights and he 
establishes his citizenship in the republic of arts 
and letters. The last three years have produced 
an increasing volume of literature written by 
Negroes and by white men about the Negro. It 
is the national ferment rising to conscious expres- 
sion. 

Among novels of white authors we have had 
“Black and White” by H. A. Shands, an admir- 
able picture of the destructive effect of race hatred 
upon a white community in Texas; and “Birth- 
right” by T. S. Stribling, “‘Nigger’’ by Clement 
Wood, and “Holiday” by Waldo Frank. Jean 
Toomer’s “‘Cane,” a lyric, vivid presentation of 
moments in a young colored man’s experience, is 
one of the distinguished American books of 1923. 
There are besides, from colored authors, Miss 
Jessie Fauset’s recently published ““There Is Con- 
fusion,’ and Walter White’s “Fire in the Flint” 
announced for fall publication. it is an activity 
with parallels in French colonial literature, of 
which “Batouala” was a pioneer work. 

On the stage, too, the Negro has made himself 
felt, whether as the subject of dramas by Eugene 
O’Neill and others, or in the success of “Shuffle 


FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION 


Along,”’ a musical comedy which, though bur- 
dened with white musical show conventions, dis- 
closed a brilliant vivacity on the stage to which 
New York was quick to respond. In these years 
the Negro tenor, Roland Hayes, has achieved an 
assured position as a singer of this country; and 
in April of 1924 Marion Anderson, contralto, and 
a colored baritone, Julius Bledsoe, made their 
debut in New York. 

Amongst critical literature by Negroes there 
have appeared «a number of important books, 
among them James Weldon Johnson’s “Anthology 
of American Negro Poetry,” with its stimulating 
introduction on the creative genius of the Negro; 
Carter G. Woodson’s ““The Negro In Our His- 
tory,’ and Benjamin Brawley’s “Social History 
of the American Negro.” Collections of Negro 
spirituals and plantation songs, among them 
Talley’s “Negro Folk Rhymes,’ have been numer- 
ous. The serious studies, on the problem of race 
relations, include the Chicago commission’s ex- 
haustive study of the Chicago race riot of 1919, 
and Frank Tannenbaum’s “Darker Phases of the 
South.” 

In the field of science, finally, the preeminence 
of a Negro was recognized last year, when Dr. 
George Washington Carver of Tuskegee, an ex- 
slave, was awarded the Spingarn Medal for his 
extraordinary discoveries in agricultural chemis- 
try, studies made in the South, adapting southern 
products, the sweet potato, peanut, etc., to many 
new uses; besides increasing soil fertility. 


FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION 


In many forms, it seems, the Negro is establish- 
ing himself. ‘The continuance of the northward 
migration of colored people has justified the con- 
tention that race adjustments are not a sectional 
but a national concern. | This is reflected in the 
Negro’s new political emancipation from tradi- 
tional party allegiance. The diffusion of the 
Negro throughout the land, reinforces the inevit- 
able conclusion drawn from his emergence as sub- 
ject of art, as artist and scientist; that he is an 
American by every right. Journalists of the 
Madison Grant-Lothrop Stoddard stripe, who 
feed the fires of race and sectarian prejudice with 
spurious doctrines of race superiority—whether 
“Nordic” or other—are confronted with the plain 
facts of what the Negro has accomplished and is 
achieving. 

The problem and the Negro’s accomplishment 
are affecting not only this country but Europeans, 
as witness Mr. F. L. Schoell’s “‘La question des 
noirs aux Etats-Unis,” published in Paris. Well 
may European powers with colonial ‘possessions 
watch the American Negro closely—as Dr. Du 
Bois told us recently they were doing—for the 
Negro is proving that he must be reckoned with 
in any coming civilization. 

So far as the presentation in this book is con- 
cerned, the picture has not changed considerably. 
The migration northward, it is true, and the ac- 
tivities of the Commission on Interracial Cooper- 
ation, have somewhat improved conditions in 
southern states. Groups of white women increas- 


FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION 


ingly have spoken out in condemnation of lynching 
as a “protection to white womanhood.” Debates 
in the House of Representatives during the effort 
to enact the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill into law, 
made the Congress for a time a forum whence the 
facts were trumpeted to the people of the country. 
But the rigid white caste dominance of the South 
with its attendant brutalities is still unbroken; 
and the South continues not only to violate the 
federal Constitution but to boast of it. There 
are still peonage, lynching, disfranchisement, and 
denial of educational opportunity to colored child- 
ren, to soil our record. 

One triumph has occurred since I wrote the 
chapter entitled “‘The American Congo.” The 
supreme courts of the United States and of Ar- 
kansas have brought about the release of the 12 
colored farmers sentenced to death in connection 
with the peonage riots of 1919—and with the 
liberation of scores of Negroes sentenced to long 
prison terms the terrorism described in that 
chapter has been dealt a blow before the nation 
and the world. The history of that victorious 
legal battle, lasting more than four years, is to 
be had in the annual reports of the National 
Association for the Advancement of Colored 
People, to whose labors the results are due. 


HY Foca 
May, 1924. 


FOREWORD 


I sHouLD apologize for so impressionistic a 
study as this of American color problems, if 
apologies were in order. But social science, such 
as it is, has evaded the subject. Much of what has 
been offered to lay readers calls to mind the acrid 
comment of Mr. Van Wyck Brooks that “‘to be 
a prophet in America it is not enough to be totally 
uninformed; one must also have a bland smile.” 
I should like to banish the bland smile from dis- 
cussion of American color problems and to chal- 
lenge the shabby indifference with which the 
wrongs of colored people in the United States are 
greeted. 

With this humane intent my expositions and 
my interpretations are perhaps complicated. If 
the result be a clearer field than has existed here- 
tofore for research and social invention, I shall 
consider the polemic elements in a work, which 
should have been undertaken by a trained sociolo- 
gist, to have been not wholly unjustified. In ex- 
tenuation for having written I have no plea except 
that of my observations, which must be judged 


FOREWORD 


accurate or inaccurate on their merits. For much 
of the material which made those observations 
possible I am indebted to the officers and to 
members of the staff of the National Association 
for the Advancement of Colored People. 
H. J. S. 
May 22, 1920. 


INTRODUCTION 


THE uniqueness and pathos of the Negro prob- 
lem in the United States rest in the fact that so 
few Americans recognize it as a problem. The 
average attitude is that a pretty good job is being 
made of a very trying situation; as to the occasion- 
al suggestion of possible tragic developments in the 
future, unless the whole matter is definitely taken 
in hand, a flippant and naive remark as to the 
valor of American manhood is usually deemed 
sufficient. Among the more serious agencies at 
work, aiming at a more enlightened attitude 
toward the race problem, may be mentioned the 
intensely race-conscious activity of DuBois and 
the broader and less emotionalized activity, on a 
national basis, of Spingarn. ‘To these must now 
be added the name of Mr. Herbert J. Seligmann, 
the young author of this volume. 

In close touch with the scientific and social 
facts, the author reviews the conclusions of an- 
thropologists with reference to alleged racial 
differences in capacity, analyzes the social and 
psychological factors at work in different parts 
of the country where the race question is acute, 
lays bare the sinister influence of selfish and 
callous individuals on whom must in large meas- 


INTRODUCTION 


ure rest the responsibility for the more tragic 
aspects of the Negro situation, and by his sym- 
pathetic and obviously open-minded attitude 
toward the future almost succeeds in creating 
a definitely optimistic mood. | 

It is to be hoped that this will not be the last 
of the author’s contributions, and that he will 
before long have the opportunity to deal with 
ever-increasing technical skill, with the several 
special aspects of the Negro problem which have 
long been awaiting an enthusiastic, able, and 
courageous protagonist. 

A. A. GOLDENWEISER. 


The New School for Social Research, 
New YorK. 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 









a BY sO 
¢ Wyte) yy 
ie. oe ’ 










ty 







‘ 
i 
yi 
(4 4 
i hs 
P 


yeh 
4 

Wt 

i} 

ti: yy 8 


Mei 
iy 
det 
? 
al 





ae ta 

ey Lette 
fe al. 
f 4! y, 





THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


I 
THE BLIND SPOT 


NTO the nerve fiber of the United States 

are woven strands which bind Negro and 
white Americans. The Civil War lacerated 
the nation’s nervous system. Slight occasion 
only is needed in order to recall suffering and 
hatred to memories still fiercely active. The 
condition of public feeling with regard to race 
is one of disease. The past lives on uncon- 
quered and poisons the present. Slavery is 
legally abolished, but neither white men nor 
Negro men are free of a constant preoccupa- 
tion with color. It is still possible to divide 
public opinion in the United States with re- 
gard to race problems on the artificial basis of 
geography, and this division is reinforced by 
tradition. A vast discussion goes on, punctu- 
ated by race riots and lynchings, thunderous 


with invective, in which the conversational 
1 1 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


tone of the scientist is almost inaudible. Many 
of the disputants’ feelings, passionately in- 
tense, colored with every sort of gossip, ru- 
mor, and half-truth, never find their way to 
frank expression in words. ‘The emotions that 
have been at one time or another fanned into 
flame as between white man and Negro; con- 
flicts over field, shop, and factory; pride of 
race and assertions of human prerogatives; the 
rights of man and the defense of womanhood; 
education, political contest, the home, public 
travel, have all become involved. Last of all, 
the emergence of the United States from her 
“splendid isolation” through war into the 
desolation of a crumbling world has been ac- 
companied by new and ominous twinges in the 
nerves of race relations. 

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to 
point to a single political or social problem 
of importance in the United States which 
does not debouch upon race and what by 
common consent is known as “the” race 
problem. School, home, factory, mine, farm, 
the polling-booth, the railway, are all made 
its vehicles. Every manifestation of the so- 
cial will hesitates at the inevitable race 
considerations. 


This welter has been lumped into a “prob- 
g 


THE BLIND SPOT 


lem”? whose symbol is black. Those who 
wear the burnished livery of the sun have 
been dehumanized and made into problems 
also—from twelve million to fifteen million 
problems, children in the cradle, school boys 
and girls,men and women. Negro Americans, 
on the other hand, fiercely resent being looked 
upon as a problem. They feel themselves to 
be a challenge that may well become retribu- 
tion. The challenge of the race problem con- 
fronts all Americans, white and black, North 
and South. Few Southerners but have learned 
the history of New England merchant cap- 
tains’ adventures in rum and slaves on the 
west coast of Africa or have forgotten the 
memorable carrying trade. The Negro is 
constantly reminded that what he does or 
fails to do is visited upon his race, and that 
he is his colored brother’s keeper. ‘The white 
man of the North, who might be inclined to 
lull himself into forgetfulness, wakes at the 
sound of shooting down his streets. He has 
heard echoes of race and the race problem in 
the speeches of United States Senators dis- 
cussing the League of Nations. Any one even 
slightly informed of American institutions, 
traditions, politics, art, society, has known 


that all the nation has been in the same boat 
3 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


with regard to the race problem. The United 
States has at various times been known abroad 
as the nation of jazz. It is not only the 
antagonisms of race that make the land con- 
scious of itself; its arts and its amusements 
have begun to feed this consciousness. In no 
activity is art so near to amusement and 
amusement so near art as in the peculiar 
rhythms of American Negro song. Unfortu- 
nately, before it was realized that Americans 
cannot afford to be cosmopolitan when they 
speak of commerce, and parochial when they 
think and speak of race, race relations had to 
be made into melodrama. In a world com- 
posed for the most part of colored races, fully 
embarked on new adventures toward au- 
tonomy, Americans had to be reminded not 
only by a great northward migration of 
colored people during the war, but by race 
riots, chiefly in 1919, that new movements and 
aspirations were stirring on their own con- 
tinent. It was blood-letting in the streets 
of American cities that accomplished anxious 
heart-searchings that were long overdue. 

A first step in an attempt upon the hates, 
distrusts, and preconceptions clustered about 
race 1s to separate and examine them. There 


is, in fact, no race problem in the United 
4 


THE BLIND SPOT 


States. There are a thousand problems with 
which race is more or less connected, fre- 
quently deliberately connected for an ulterior 
motive, in the absence of organic connection 
between race distinctions and the subject at 
issue. ‘To take these thousand problems of 
education, politics, industry, and lump them 
is to give over to emotion what should be the 
province of study and social invention. The 
process is best illustrated by two questions: 
‘Do you want your daughter to marry a 
nigger?” is a Southern summation of and 
for white men. That is a reduction of the 
race problem to what many conceive to be its 
lowest and most fundamental terms. “Shall 
I be set apart like a leper, insulted, denied 
justice, and lynched because I am accused of 
wanting to marry the white man’s daughter?” 
retorts the Negro. “And shall the white man 
have children by my daughter and be pro- 
hibited by law from marrying her?” To 
leave race relations at this point is to create 
an impasse. There is no answer to either of 
the questions. If every time the Negro de- 
mands better housing and schooling for his 
children, justice in the courts, equal oppor- 
tunity for employment, he is to be denied 


them on the ground that it means race amal- 
5 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


gamation, there is nothing for it but to leave 
the issue to arms and to maintain a white 
army sufficient to keep the subject race in 
subjection. Fortunately there is much evi- 
dence that race problems are not merely 
biological, that they are susceptible to social 
invention and intelligent manipulation. Such 
evidence was presented as perhaps never be- 
fore in the race riots that occurred in the 
United States during and immediately after 
the end of the World War. 

If white Americans are minded to accept 
the evidence so crudely offered, they may be 
in a position to absorb consciously, as they 
have not done, the cultural contributions of 
their colored neighbors. Colored Americans 
may then be liberated from the pressure 
which no one realizes better than their own 
leaders is cramping their efforts, making them 
provincial and yet critically aloof, bitterly 
conscious of themselves as a hostile group 
in an ill-ordered community. Granted that 
there are distrusts and hostilities that come of 
superficial differences between men, like color, 
or like follicular structure of the hair differen- 
tiating kinky from straight, it is a savage 
thing for white men who call themselves civil- 


ized to let such primitive impulses determine 
6 


THE BLIND SPOT 


their conduct. Yet the history of race rela- 
tions in the United States, a history only as 
yet included in larger and more diffuse stud- 
ies, or suggested in biographies, essays, and 
memoirs, will show: the dominance of these 
primitive impulses in an attack upon the 
nation’s deepest-rooted and most pressing 
difficulties. 

To those who insist that racial antipathies 
must be allowed to determine race relations 
there are two replies: First, that to do so 
brings, as it has brought, violence. Second, 
that there is overwhelming evidence to show 
that race antipathy is not even skin deep. 
The decrease in illicit sex relations between 
white and colored people of the South, where 
intermarriage is illegal, is due not to instinctive 
aversion, but to the pressure of public opinion. 
When it used to be regarded as an enter- 
taining foible for white men of prominence | 
to maintain colored families without benefit 
of clergy, the practice was fairly common. 
Now that exposure of such relationships 
would ruin any aspirant’s political and social 
career, white men are more wary and illicit 
relationships of the sort are said to be de- 
creasing in number. A dangerous error of 


persons who insist on the validity of “racial | 
7 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


antipathy” is to assume that the exceptional 
conditions which prevail in the United States 
are typical. But nowhere else have economic 
considerations and race relations been joined 
as issues In armed conflict as in the Civil 
War. Of Latin America, Professor Shepherd 
tells us that “properly speaking there is no 
race question . . . because from the colonial 
period onward the ethnical elements have 
tended to become merged into a new divi- 
sion of mankind.” ! In the circumstances It is 
incumbent on the upholders of racial antipa- 
thy’s function in a democracy to show that 
it is operative and effective. 

Much of the bitterness that has befogged 
discussion of race problems has proceeded 
from observations honestly made in past 
years, but since discredited by anthropolo- 
gists. Many passionate Unionists, during 
the Civil War even, were convinced of an 
essential “‘racial inferiority’? of the Negro, 
and allowed their beliefs, on which investiga- 
tion has thrown new light, to erect obstacles 
to Negro participation in the state and in 
society. No less a contributor to our knowl- 
edge than Louis Agassiz wrote in 1863 that 

1 William R. Shepherd, Latin America, p. 123. New York: Henry 


Holt & Co. 
8 


THE BLIND SPOT 


on Egyptian monuments “the Negroes are 
so represented as to show that in natural 
propensities and mental abilities they were 
pretty much what we find them at the present 
day — indolent, playful, sensual, imitative, 
subservient, good-natured, versatile, unsteady 
in their purpose, devoted, and affectionate. 

. . While Egypt and Carthage grew into 
powerful empires and attained a high degree 
of civilization; while in Babylon, Syria, and 
Greece were developed the highest culture 
of antiquity, the Negro race groped in bar- 
barism and never originated a regular organi- 
zation among themselves.” ‘The conclusions 
of Agassiz left him unprepared “to state what 
political privileges they are fit to enjoy now; 
though I have no hesitation in saying that 
they should be equal to other men before 
the law.” ! 

But since 1863 the sciences of men have 
become distrustful of “‘natural propensities”’; 
and even of races which have been most 
carefully studied anthropologists hesitate to 
say what are their racial characteristics. 
Furthermore, modern anthropology does not 
credit white men with having changed racially, 

1 James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. VI, Chap. 


XXXI, letter from Agassiz to Dr. Samuel G. Howe. 1863. Pp. 37.38. 
; 9 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


in so far as their natural propensities are 
concerned, since the Egyptian artificers made 
the monuments to which Agassiz refers. It 
would be as fair to deduce the disposition 
of present-day white men from monuments 
contemporaneous with those erected by the 
Pharaohs as to attach significance to the 
characters of ancient sculptured Negro faces. 
Comment of which that of Agassiz 1s typical 
still passes current, however, and is given the 
force of dogma by those predisposed to it. 
Many of the dogmas about the Negro 
which find astonishingly wide acceptance 
are of such general and inclusive nature that 
they can be immediately disposed of. For 
example, the one which has it that the Negro 
is by nature indolent and lacking in per- 
sistence, because he comes of a savage race 
and savages have those characteristics, is not 
borne out by observation. Savages of many 
tribes in various parts of the world display 
extraordinary pertinacity. With inferior im- 
plements they laboriously achieve results 
which the white man would hesitate to attempt 
because of the sustained and arduous labor 
involved. To cut down a tree with stone 
hatchets and then to make a canoe from the 


trunk by burning out the core is no task 
10 


THE BLIND SPOT 


for the indolent or the man of unsteady 
purpose. All of the beliefs held about the 
Negro by white men, more or less misinformed, 
constitute one of the main problems of race 
in the United States. It is a problem inten- 
sified rather than lessened by such means 
of communication as the press. Whether 
or not the Negro is what his bitterest enemy 
says of him hardly matters. If any body of 
public opinion can be organized upon mis- 
statements as a foundation, all public dis- 
cussion will be colored by the most obvious 
fabrications and absurdities. 

There is the utmost hesitance, for example, 
to trace to its lair the gossip from Civil War 
days which still lives on. The nation is 
expected, when enforcement of the Fifteenth 
Amendment to the United States Constitu- 
tion is suggested, to thrill with horror at the 
mere thought of “Negro domination” in the 
South. If Negroes were conceived to be 
human beings like many another human 
bemg, educable and educated, adapted to 
the processes of American government and 
appreciative that liberty for oneself implies 
liberty for others, Negro domination would 
have no immense terrors. But paint the 


Negro’s portrait as of a sullen black brute, 
1 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


criminal when he has opportunity to be, 
intent upon debasing the limpid intellectuality 
of the superior race by admixing his own base 
blood, desirous chiefly of dining with the 
white man and of marrying his daughter, 
incapable of intellectual development after 
he has reached the age of fourteen years, 
then you have laid the basis for assertions 
like that of Senator John Sharpe Williams, 
that race transcends the Constitution; and 
for sympathetic response to the statement 
that, come what will, no Negro will ever vote 
in a state like South Carolina, where in 1910 
there were 835,843 Negroes and 679,161 
white men. Of misinformation and terror 
it is difficult to say which has played the 
greater part in preventing a decent adjust- 
ment of the Negro’s claims to the ballot 
and to other prerogatives of citizenship. 

It is possible to take any group of a race, 
as 1s frequently done in the case of Negroes, 
and point to its members as uneducated, 
vagrant, unfit for civic responsibilities. But 
to erect the ignorance of men, to whom their 
state has denied education, into a threat of 
domination by the ignorant and the brutal 
is as fantastic as to say that ignorance is 


proof of the uselessness of education. Such 
12 


THE BLIND SPOT 


absurdities would hardly be the province of 
serious discussion of race relations if they 
did not frequently even yet form the body of 
discussion in many parts of the United States. 
Much water has run under many bridges 
since President Andrew Johnson and a Con- 
gress he antagonized bungled the matter of 
readjusting the seceded Southern states to 
the Union. 

But the South to-day still feeds upon the 
stories of carpet-bagger dominion, the “black 
and tan”’ Constitutional Convention of Mis- 
sissipp1 with its extravagance, and the finan- 
cial orgies of Louisiana and South Carolina 
legislatures. Historians of the first rank, 
even, have not escaped the tendency to touch 
lightly the pride and the humiliation of men 
who found their former slaves not only no 
longer their possessions—an economic loss— 
but were expected to tolerate disfranchise- 
ment while those abhorred men voted. The 
present generation is in danger of hardening 
reticence into doctrine, of making monuments 
of past sorrows and humiliations which bar 
the way to effective discussion and progress. 
If, as is asserted, carpet-bag rule and the 
participation of uneducated Negroes in state 


government resulted in tragic waste and 
18 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


terrible conditions of social disorganization, 
it must still be borne in mind that men 
blame what they oppose for all their mis- 
fortunes rather than trace those misfortunes 
dispassionately to their source. With all the 
suffering and the losses imposed upon the 
South—as upon any region in which war is 
waged—the offer of Congress to the Southern 
states, “compared with the settlement of 
any other notable civil war by a complete 
victor,’ as James Ford Rhodes points out, 
was “magnanimous in a high degree. It 
involved no executions, no confiscation of 
property, no imprisonments. . .. It vouch- 
safed to the Southern states the management 
of their own local affairs subject to the recog- 
nition of the civil rights of the Negroes, to 
the Freedmen’s Bureau limited in time, and 
to a temporary military occupation.” His- 
tory is irrelevant except as it continues to 
live on in the present. And Rhodes’s char- 
acterization of the attitude of the former 
slaveholders toward the Negro is significant 
in this discussion. Pointing out that the 
slaveholder did not hate the Negro, he 
continues, ““They did not believe that he 
could rise in the scale of civilization, nor did 


they wish him to rise, and they were indignant 
14 


THE BLIND SPOT 


at the mention of a possible political or social 
equality.” This attitude was made effective, 
according to the report which Carl Schurz 
sent the President. Of the people of the 
South, he said, that “while accepting the 
‘abolition of slavery,’ they think that some 
species of serfdom, peonage, or other form of 
compulsory labor is not slavery and may be 
introduced without a violation of their pledge. 
Although formally admitting Negro testimony, 
they think that Negro testimony will be taken 
practically for what they themselves consider 
it ‘worth.’”?! The so-called “Black Codes” 
would have perpetuated what the moral 
judgment of the nation and the decision of 
arms had condemned. By act of the Mis- 
sissippi legislature of 1865 a poll tax of one 
dollar was imposed upon Negroes between 
the ages of eighteen and sixty. “Failure to 
pay the tax,” says Garner, “was to be deemed 
prima facie evidence of vagrancy, and it was 
made the duty of the sheriff to arrest the 
offender and hire him out for the amount of 
the tax plus the costs. .. . Civil officers were 
required to arrest freedmen who should run 
away from their contracts and carry them 

1 James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. V, Chap. 


XXX, p. 553. 
15 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


back to the place of employment.’ ! The 
Black Codes, says Mr. Paul Leland Haworth, 
““were in part an honest effort to meet a 
difficult situation, but the old slavery attitude 
toward the Negro peered through most of 
them and gave proof that their framers did 
not yet realize that the old order had passed 
away.’ ? That old orders do not speedily 
pass away has been almost too often demon- 
strated, especially when the old order is so 
inwoven in current thought and utterance 
that its influence is to most persons imper- 
ceptible. To an extent that few Americans 
realize the old order persists. It is justified 
on the ground of a variety of necessities, and 
draws into its entanglements human and 
political relations of every sort. It can 
stand against law and legislation better than 
against pitiless statement and publication 
of fact. 

If the Black Codes throw light on the 
opposition to the Negro’s economic advance- 
ment which persists to this day, present 
talk of Negro domination is illumined by the 
report of the joint committee of Congress 


1James Wilford Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1901. 
New York: Macmillan Company. Pp. 114, 115. 
2 Paul Leland Haworth, Reconstruction and Union, 1865-1912, 
New York: Henry Holt & Co. P. 16. 
16 





THE BLIND SPOT 


into the activities of the Ku-Klux Klan. 
There is a wide divergence of opinion as to 
the justification for the outrages which were 
visited upon Unionists and Negro Republicans 
in the South. Justification is sought in 
the dangers from criminal vagrants, and the 
Ku-Klux bands who spread terror are com- 
pared with the posse comitatus of the West 
which rid the surrounding country of horse- 
thieves and gamblers. But the divergence 
of opinion extends even to Southerners. With- 
out imputing exclusively political motives 
to the white brotherhood, it is still possible 
to question the necessity for what was done, 
to inquire if fear rather than fact was not its 
motive impulse. Gen. J. B. Gordon, who 
commanded the left wing of Lee’s army at the 
surrender, was asked by the joint committee: 

““Have the Negroes, as a general thing, 
behaved well since the war?” 

His reply was, “They have behaved so well 
that the remark is not uncommon in Georgia 
that no race on earth, relieved from servitude 
under such circumstances as they were, would 
have behaved so well.”’ ! | 


1 Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condi- 
tion of Affairs in the late Insurrectionary States, 1872, Vol. I, p. 53. 
Washington: Government Printing Office. 

2 17 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


The faith which Negro slaves kept with 
their masters absent in the war, caring for 
white families, guarding white women and 
children, is proverbial. Under the circum- 
stances, the actions of the white South during 
Reconstruction are referable rather to emotion 
than to situations requiring drastic response. 

“The excuse that the whites were goaded 
into such outrages by the evils of Negro 
domination,” says Doctor Haworth of the 
Ku-Klux, “‘is true only in part, for the Klans 
displayed notable activity in opposing the 
new state constitutions and in the election of 
state officers before the blacks were yet in 
power.” ! 

“The five and a half million whites,” says 
Rhodes, “who were legislating for three and a 
half million blacks were under the influence 
of ‘the black terror’ which was not known 
and therefore not appreciated at the North. 
Many of the laws were neither right nor far- 
sighted, but they were natural.’ And then, 
as if to clinch the efficacy of the “‘terror” 
motive, he adds, “‘The enactments the least 
liberal as to civil rights and the most rigorous 
as to punishment of misdemeanors and crimes 
were those of South Carolina, Mississippi, and 


1Op.cit., pp. 44, 45. 
18 


THE BLIND SPOT 


Louisiana, in which states the proportion of 
Negroes to white men was the largest.” ! 
Situations change, but the style of argumenta- 
tion on the race question seems forever to 
continue unchanged. In fifty-four years Ne- 
groes in the United States demonstrated 
that not only could they acquire the funda- 
mentals of education necessary to partici- 
pation in the processes of democratic govern- 
ment, but they have made progress that 
would be considered extraordinary when meas- 
ured by any standards. Against the initial 
opposition and disbelief expressed in the 
Black Codes and subsequent disfranchisement 
in the Southern states; against the repression 
most violently imposed by the Ku-Klux 
and still a part of the code of many white 
Americans, they have with relentless deter- 
mination built business enterprise, gone to the 
land and made it yield to them, fought their 
way by sheer work and talent into the closed 
ranks of the professions, furnished to the 
United States government district attorneys, 
consular and diplomatic officers, and against 
most determined opposition, military leaders 
and soldiers. In the commerce between cult- 
ured representatives of the Negro and white 
1 Op. cit., Vol. V, Chap. XXX, p. 568. 
19 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


races, where the Negro is freed from the 
attitude of defense and awkward apprehen- 
sion, and the white man has progressed beyond 
the savage canon which says that strangers 
are enemies, a reciprocity becomes possible 
that has a slight zest of adventure and chal- 
lenges perception. From the point of view 
of such friendships, which the Southern code 
would bar, distinctions of color are as extrane- 
ous as those of nationality. It is at once 
tragic and laughable that the meanest white 
man whose universe is bounded by his local 
newspaper and his own hates should take 
precedence over the colored student and 
artist; 1t 1s one of those ironies of which the 
world is prodigal that by a rigid dogma 
enforced with all the conviction of inquisi- 
tion, bounds should be set to the work of the 
scientist, that people should be misinformed, 
hates perpetuated and introduced in new 
fields, creative spirits checked and frustrated. 
As the emphasis of the modern state shifts 
and inclines from political achievement to 
the task of freemg men from the imposition 
of the deadening task and the drudgery of 
overwork, there come to mind words spoken 
by Governor Humphreys of Mississippi in his 


inaugural of 1865: 
20 


THE BLIND SPOT 


“The Negro, he said, was free, whether 
the people liked it or not, but freedom did 
not make him a citizen or entitle him to 
political or social equality with white men.” ! 

In those places where the Negro has achieved 
political equality with white men, that free- 
dom still does not give him industrial equality. 
The Negro student of law, the university 
graduate, too often is free to vote in the same 
booth with the white man, but must seek 
employment as a Pullman porter. Of the 
denial of opportunity in the North which 
still prevails there is a survey in Miss Mary 
White Ovington’s Half a Man. 

Complications of political problems by 
passions rooted in race and sex are carried 
over into industry and for a time will make 
social organizations more difficult. Ii the 
prejudice ‘against the Negro’s voting and 
holding office is a matter of balance of power, 
the excuse being his alleged unfitness, the 
prejudice against him in industry will have 
to be met by extraordinary proof. 

Unfortunately, the problem of the Negro’s 
participation in political and civil life has 
seldom received precise formulation. It is 
admitted, though not universally, that he 


1Garner. Op. cit., p. 111. 
21 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


should be the equal of the white man before 
the law. The mequality here is in part a 
corollary of the development of law and legal 
procedure as instruments of class. In part 
it is due to a habit of mind so inured to prej- 
udice that injustice and discrimination be- 
come routine. The demands of the political 
state differ from the demand of blind justice 
whose unseeing gaze supposedly rests neither 
on dark skin nor meager purse. But the 
political state and democracy especially are 
entitled to no further questions than: Can 
you read and write? Are you capable of un- 
derstanding the issues upon which, as an elec- 
tor, you will be required to pass? With these 
questions the peculiar biological disposition of 
the Negro has nothing to do. Granted that he 
might in his own environment, played upon by 
streams of culture—the arts, literature, political 
thought—evolve a civilization different from 
the one in which he is placed. The question re- 
mains: Can and does the colored citizen of the 
United States conform to the minimum require- 
ments of political democracy? If he can and 
does meet the test, which in effect asks him if 
he is a human being, by what justification is 
he deprived of his prerogative? To state the 


question is to answer it. Politics has no 
22 


THE BLIND SPOT 


concern, under the theory which is supposed 
to dominafe American procedure, with ques- 
tions properly referable to anthropologists. 
Those questions, be it said, involve measure- 
ments and observations more delicate than 
would be conceded by the persons who invoke 
the questions. In the play of political life, 
which has consisted in endeavoring to make 
recalcitrant fact fit the mold of men’s desire, 
the colored United States citizen has been 
the victim of extraneous issues, created and 
constantly invoked by those who in effect 
want to divorce the practice of American 
government from the affirmations upon which, 
presumptively, it rests. 

Such discussion seems academic when it is 
opposed to the brute realities with which 
American public opinion is faced. Colored 
citizens of the United States are still pub- 
licly burned alive at the stake. Much edi- 
torial discussion states rather than implies 
that colored people are less than beasts of the 
field. Many a Mississippian will affirm, as 
the Jackson, Mississippi, Daily News did on 
June 20, 1919, “‘that the door of hope is 
forever closed to the Negro, in so far as partic- 
ipation in politics is concerned, and there is 


no appeal from that decree.”’ 
23 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


That remark was accompanied by a thinly 
veiled threat against a propaganda conducted 
by the “Lincoln League of America”: “If 
this propaganda is to embrace the desire to 
vote, then it had better be located north of 
the Ohio River. It will not be safe in Mem- 
phis and its issuance of propaganda will be 
short-lived.” 

Propaganda embracing ‘“‘the desire to 
vote” unsafe south of the Ohio River? The 
question is one which, if pursued, would throw 
much light on tolerance south of the Ohio 
River, and the effect of that peculiar sort of 
tolerance on the right to hold opinions and 
express them elsewhere in the United States. 
It will be observed that the discrimination 
is categorical—color divides the country. It 
is an unfortunate division to perpetuate in 
political and social life. 

All human values are put in the scales 
that are tipped against the Negro. It is 
almost a commonplace of civilized dogma 
that the brutal man hurts himself more 
deeply than he does the object of his brutality. 
Yet this observation, typical of civilization, 
seems to have little practical effect on the 
conduct of many white Americans toward 


the Negro. Lynching, the public murder, 
24 


THE BLIND SPOT 


often with unspeakable mutilations and tort- 
ure, of colored men will be spoken of as 
though it occurred only in rural communities 
where social organization approximates that 
of frontiers throughout the world. But from 
this point of view a large portion of the United 
States still consists of frontier; its civilization 
is in the making. The country enjoyed the 
spectacle in July, 1919, of a Governor of 
Mississippi hesitating to prevent what was 
announced in glaring newspaper head-lines 
would be a burning at stake, on the ground 
that an overwhelming public sentiment in 
his state made him powerless. It matters 
little that the Negro was accused of “‘the one 
crime,” rape. Even if, as one colored news- 
paper affirmed was the case, the victim had 
been guilty of attracting the regard of, and 
not of assaulting, a white woman, the penalty 
would still have been death. For with the 
rope, the torch, the pistol, that Negro is 
answered who so much as gives occasion for 
believing he has said an intimate word to a 
white woman. The attitude which prompts 
a spirited defense of such barbarity will have 
to be removed from the United States before 
this country can pretend to civilization. One 


effective means of removing it 1s to show it 
25 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


as a corollary of class exploitation of the 
Negro. 

Garner! tells of the emigration which was 
urged by Confederate leaders, among them 
Gen. Sterling Price, who wrote from Mexico 
in December, 1865, “I pray to God that my 
fears for the future of the South may never 
be realized, but when the right is given to the 
Negro to bring suit, testify before the courts, 
and vote in elections, you all had better be 
in Mexico.” 

The objection is to the Negro’s being 
accorded “political and civil rights.” 

‘“As soon as it became evident,” says 
Garner, “that free Negro labor could be 
made profitable, and that the admission of 
the Negro to the witness-stand and the jury- 
box would not be accompanied by the terrible 
results predicted, the emigration movement 
died out entirely.” 

If there was reason for saying that the 
emigration movement was a “delusion gotten 
up for the benefit of speculators,” fortified 
by a fear that free Negro labor could not be 
made “profitable,” there is every reason now 
for believing that race antagonisms are fo- 
mented by those who exploit the Negro. 


10p. cit., p. 134. 
26 


THE BLIND SPOT 


> 


“The refusal of the legislature,” says Gar- 
ner, “to accord the Negro civil and political 
rights was, of course, due to prejudices and 
traditions which constituted a part of the 
very fabric of Southern society, and the sud- 
den banishment of which was not an easy 
task.” 

Any society which profits from the labor 
of its members, denies them social privileges 
like education, proper sanitation, and decent 
housing, and denies civil prerogatives such 
as legal redress, may be said to be founded 
upon exploitation of those individuals. The 
reports of the Commissioner of Education 
and the mortality rates for Negroes are a 
commentary on the attention given the race 
as a group in the Southern states. To allow 
any man to work and produce and not to 
accord him the benefits and the protection 
of the society which he makes possible is a 
crude form of exploitation which, as regards 
the Negro, is still the rule rather than the 
exception. 

W. D. Weatherford! has made quite clear 
the realization of a few progressive Southern 
white men that “if the Negro race is dying 

1W. D. Weatherford, Present Forces in Negro Progress, 1912, pp. 


73-74. New York: Association Press. 
27 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


rapidly, the white man is responsible. I 
mean,” he explains, emphatically, “in the 
country we give him so little training in the 
laws of hygiene that he does not know the 
art of self-preservation. I mean that we 
allow city landlords to build abominable 
huts in which the Negro has to live. We allow 
the streets in the section where he lives— 
even though within the city limits—to go 
without drainage, sewerage, paving, or even 
garbage service. We allow practices which 
no self-respecting community ought to allow, 
and all these things result in indifference, 
immorality, physical inability, and death for 
the Negro—and we are his murderers... . 
The truth is that in our day the criminal 
most to be feared is not the red-handed mur- 
derer or the pad-footed robber, but the men 
who, clothed in all their high respectability, 
sit in their fine offices and smile, while poor 
devils all around them are dying for want 
of protection from the greed of the money 
shark, the lust of the landlord, and the 
chicanery of the cheap politician.” 

The exploitation of the Negro in the United 
States is a procedure in which Northern and 
Southern white men have been jointly con- 


cerned. Every time a colored man is lynched 
28 


THE BLIND SPOT 


or burned at stake, the entire nation partic- 
ipates through the press. Its indifference is 
in reality active tolerance. “‘Only a Negro,”’ 
when it is applied to lynching, deadens spon- 
taneous protest when the landlord terrorizes 
the Negro farm tenant or drives Negro labor, 
or when the white labor-unionist discrimi- 
nates against the colored workman. ‘Only 
a Negro” becomes the excuse, the justifica- 
tion for every sort of injustice and oppression. 
Undertaken by individuals and groups of 
the community for their own gains, the ex- 
ploitation is justified socially, tolerated by 
the community and the state, erected finally 
into a dogma which, when it is not upheld 
and defended, becomes a commonplace. 
Where there is not actual slavery in the form 
of terrorism, social discrimination, and absence 
of the flimsiest pretense at justice, it is poten- 
tial in the indifference which prevails with 
regard to those practices. Freedom consists 
not in a law abolishing slavery. It consists 
in passionate and determined affirmation of 
the value of human lives as against the dis- 
position to exploit human beings. It is as 
absurd to justify wretched housing for the 
Negro by saying that better housing means 


race amalgamation as it is to repeat the 
29 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


unverified and unverifiable gossip about “‘race 
inferiority’? which was used to oppose the 
abolition of slavery in Civil War days. Any 
group which desires material advantage from 
the exploitation of another group always 
takes pains to characterize its victims as 
inferior. There have been times when Eng- 
lishmen were as assured of the inferiority of 
the Irish, as many a white man now is about 
the “nigger.”” The Turk is doubtless con- 
vinced of the inferiority of the Armenian; 
the Magyar and the Czech, the Rumanian 
and the Magyar, the Polish noble and 
the Jew, all furnish examples of oppres- 
sion justified by spurious “‘inferiorities.”’ 
Under cover of these appeals to contempt 
and passion the human relations which 
make civilization possible are _ ruthlessly 
violated. 

The United States has been paying the 
price for its misinformation about race rela- 
tions and its indifference to the administra- 
tion of those relations. It is not race riot 
so much as the spirit which is given rein and 
perpetuated in mob violence that is destruc- 
tive of civilization. For every riot which 
has occurred in consequence of the fomenting 


of race hatred half a dozen have smoldered, 
30 


THE BLIND SPOT 


ready to burst into conflagrations that would 
have consumed hundreds of lives. Many 
American cities have had all the elements 
provocative of race riot except the accident 
that brings about armed conflict. North 
and South may be divided by a difference 
in the intensity of feeling on race matters of 
their white and colored citizens, not by the 
incidence of riot. 

It is asserted on the one hand that what 
creates race problems in the South is the 
Negro’s absolute inferiority; on the other 
that race problems arise not by reason of the 
Negro’s inherent character, but only where 
he is numerous. In fact, economic conditions 
play their part, and the consequence of eco- 
nomic conflict is to attach to racial distinction 
what does not properly belong to it. Thus, 
Phillips quotes John Adams as having written 
in 1795: 

“Argument might have [had] some weight 
in the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, 
but the real cause was the multiplication of 
laboring white people, who would no longer * 
suffer the rich to employ these sable rivals 
so much to their injury... . If the gentlemen 
had been permitted by law to hold slaves, 
the common white people would have put 

31 if 


¥ 
é 
nese 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


the Negroes to death, and their masters, too, 
perhaps.” ! 

The issue in Massachusetts, if we are to 
accept John Adams’s statement, was not the 
rights of man or any ethical consideration, 
nor was it the inferiority or superiority of the 
black workman, his physical or other char- 
acteristics. It was, just as it was during the 
steel strike late in 1919, a question of the 
use by employers of one group of working- 
people to undercut the wages of another 
group. Disturbances such as occurred at 
the steel-plants were called race riots because 
the participants happened to differ in color. 
This, as will be developed in subsequent 
chapters, has often been the case. The ex- 
pression of industrial, social, political conflict 
in “race riot” is only a crude demonstration 
of the fact that race hatred is a convenient 
and much-abused term used to describe desires 
far less unconscious and less defensible than 
race hatred is supposed to be. 

What the course will be of race relations 
in the United States it would be hazardous 
to venture to predict. It can be said only 
that the information upon which most per- 

‘Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 1918. New 


York: D. Appleton & Co., p. 119. 
32 


THE BLIND SPOT 


sons form their judgments is inaccurate; 
that the forces which make for improved 
race relations have for the most part derived 
their support from a small number of individ- 
uals; and that almost every national social 
power, from the. press to the United States 
army, including such agents of the state 
as the Department of Justice, the House of 
Representatives, and the Senate, contrives 
increasingly to becloud the issues under- 
lying race conflict and to embitter feeling. 
On the other hand, the Negro’s new impor- 
tance to Northern industry, even as a weapon 
against white labor-unionism, will force white 
unionists, once they realize the folly of per- 
petuating the Negro workers’ enmity, to 
accept him as one of themselves. In that 
event race relations will more obviously 
go into the phase of class conflict, in which 
economic position rather than race will de- 
termine men’s attitudes. Meanwhile the 
point at which to arrest wasteful, violence- 
breeding conceptions is in childhood. To 
children prejudices are foreign and _ alien 
until they absorb them from parent or 
teacher. If ostracism were as swift and as 
certain for the white man who says what is 


demonstrably false about the Negro as for 
3 33 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


the man who upholds the Negro’s claims 
to citizenship, the vexing and vexed “‘race 
problem” would soon cease to complicate 
every plan and activity of United States 
citizens. 


inl 
WHY RACE RIOTS? 


PERSPECTIVE of recent American 

history reveals armed conflicts between 
white men and black, like beacon fires, serv- 
ing as illuminants and as warnings. The 
summer and early fall of 1919 especially were 
distinguished by outbreaks which seemed to 
many a portent of race war to come. In 
June bloody conflict raged in Longview, 
Texas, bursts of fire spat from houses in 
which colored men defended themselves from 
a white mob—only to have the houses later 
burned to the ground. In the same month 
the national capital became for three days 
the stamping-ground of rioters who were 
massed and did their will in the streets about 
the government buildings. The Negro resi- 
dence district was made a zone which white 
men entered at their peril. Chicago, Knox- 
ville, Omaha, Charleston, Elaine—the roster 


of names Is monotonously long; the casualty 
35 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


lists startling. Each disaster in which hate 
found a vent and more hate was born came 
upon all the country, except the community 
which suffered, as a strange and _ terrible 
phenomenon—so terrible a commentary on 
our civilization as to be forgotten almost as 
soon as it was past. Vaguely, it was 
attributed to Negro criminality, the quick 
spread of a brawl, or to “race hatred.” 
Southern editors jibed at Northern cities, 
and the North became aware of a “national 
problem.’ Awareness of that problem was 
intensified not so much by reason of the 
persons who died or were maimed as by the 
hatred displayed. It overran civil govern- 
ment and released primitive impulses in acts 
more bestial than the best or worst of savagery. 

Cynics as to democratic processes remark 
by way of comment that in the cycle of his- 
tory the crowd that howled down the streets 
of Rome under the late emperors is akin to 
to-day’s mob—that empire let blood in the 
circus, and now democracy turns its streets 
into a Colosseum. It is an easy way of dis- 
posing of the race question to tell the indi- 
vidual that the kingdom of God is within 
him and that governments are only protean 


mobs. In its counsel of despair, it parallels 
36 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


the assertion of the amateur biologist who 
insists that Negro and white can never live 
peaceably side by side. Race relations must 
continue a hopeless problem, is the argument, 
for there is an “instinct” of race hatred; 
when a man’s color or physiognomy is exceed- 
ing strange to you, you must necessarily 
hate him. The instinct is asserted to be a 
counterpart to the tendency of races to pro- 
tect their “racial integrity.”’ In so far as 
American race riots are concerned, the ‘“‘in- 
stinct”’ of race hatred can be shown to be a 
fiction. The evidence from the race riots 
themselves, which have been caused by every 
sort of industrial and political conflict utterly 
unconnected with race relations, is borne 
out by the testimony of anthropologists, 
especially and chiefly Franz Boas. 

Race riots, it will be shown, are attributable 
to nothing so simple as an instinct or a 
tendency. It is true that the passion which 
fighting-men feel is individual, but the deter- 
minants of that passion are environmental 
and social and are subject to control. The 
South, which created additional problems 
for the War Department by reason of its 
hostility to the presence and the training 


of Negro troops, held it against French 
37 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


people that they welcomed those troops. 
That is a commentary on the relation of 
environment to the “instinct” of race hatred. 
What is summarized as an instinct is rather 
a complex of the forces at work in the nation. 
Few aspects of American life, industrial, 
political, social, but are in some way contrib- 
utory to the spirit which finds its release 
in mob clashes. Sometimes, lurking behind 
the name of race riot is discovered the plot- 
ting and counter-plotting of factions in a 
city government; almost always the evil 
spirit of propaganda; frequently, a contest 
between organized labor and employer; again, 
the activities of real-estate speculators. If 
government in this country is not to be rele- 
gated to hazardous intervals between mob 
impacts, the stimulants of race riots deserve 
examination and analysis. 

The background for race riots is furnished 
by what might be called the “color psychosis” 
of the South. It is in the South that the 
problem of the adjustment of white and 
Negro populations has been rooted, and the 
South suffers from a chronic illness that is the 
consequence of the attitude of most Southern 
white men toward the Negro. 

“Ts the Negro out of politics in the South?” 

38 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


asked Dr. W. E. B. DuBois some years ago. 
‘Has there been a single Southern campaign 
in the last twenty years in which the Negro 
has not figured as the prime issue?” The 
penalty for the social and political disabilities 
imposed upon the Negro has been that he is 
constantly in the minds of white people. 
From contempt, with its admixture of self- 
reproach, to hostility is a short step and an 
easy one. Hence the apprehension with which 
the white South looked upon the induction 
of Negroes into the army; hence, in the past, 
the quick resort to the rope, the pistol, the 
torch. That the South is a “‘white man’s 
country” is a dogma affirmed in practice 
not only oratorically and by editors, but with 
bullets and whip. It is expressed in lynch- 
ings and beatings, until the spirit of the 
Negro begins to change and he buys arms 
to defend himself. Then you have Long- 
view, with white men dead and Negro resi- 
dences burned. 

The Southern dogma colors the opinions 
of the rest of the country. Negroes’ houses 
were bombed in Chicago before the race 
riots of July, 1919. It is true that the influx 
of Negroes had caused real-estate values at 


first to become depreciated. But the bomb- 
39 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


ings would never have taken place if the 
Negro himself, as a human being, had not been 
depreciated in the esteem of his neighbors 
by a hostile propaganda. Mr. Carl Sand- 
burg! remarked that the Chicago police were 
inclined to believe the bombings the result 
rather of the “‘clash between two real-estate 
interests’” than of ‘“‘race feeling.” If the 
diagnosis was correct it stands as another 
demonstration of the play of other motives 
on the relations of the races. 

That the traditional attitude of the South 
has not been without effect was demonstrated 
in the Washington riots and in Omaha, where 
the mob outburst was not properly a race riot 
at all. In Washington, a propaganda con- 
ducted by several powerful newspapers, play- 
ing upon the sex antagonism of white men for 
black and accusing Negroes of assaults upon 
white women, inflamed hoodlums. In Omaha 
a similar propaganda undertaken from polit- 
ical motives brought about the lynching of 
a Negro suspect, the wrecking of the court- 
house, and an attempt upon the life of the 
mayor. The propaganda of a particular 
Western newspaper was credited by the chief 

Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots, 1919. New York 


Harcourt, Brace & Howe. 
40 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


of police, the Omaha Ministerial Union, and 
indirectly by Maj.-Gen. Leonard Wood with 
contributing to, if not causing, the riot; and 
it was established in court that the man- 
aging editor of that newspaper had been 
born and bred in the South. Reports of 
both Washington and Omaha riots sent to 
Northern newspapers assumed acquiescence 
in the Southern doctrine that the Negro is a 
rapist. Given the background of belief and 
superstition about the Negro which emanates 
from the South, it is not difficult to foment 
antagonisms. | 
Of the Chicago riot which followed hard 
upon Washington, no one even hinted that 
assaults by Negroes were a cause. As Mr. 
Sandburg pointed out, a multiplicity of ele- 
ments brought about the tension which burst 
into violent conflict. But the main deter- 
minants here were (1) encroachments of mi- 
grant Negroes from the South upon white 
residence districts; (2) antagonism to non- 
union Negro workmen in the stockyards; 
(3) hostility arising from the part played by 
the Negro vote in electing an unpopular city 
administration. No insignificant part in fo- 
menting race hatred in Chicago was played 


by the Kenwood and Hyde Park Property 
41 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Owners’ Association. Months, even, after the 
riots, in which thirty-eight persons were 
killed, this association was sending out appeals 
to “every white person, property-owner in 
Hyde Park” to “protect your property.” 
“Shall we sacrifice our property for a third 
of its value and run like rats from a burning 
ship,” said a notice, “or shall we put up a 
united front and keep Hyde Park desirable 
for ourselves?” And a letter sent out at 
the same time said, “We are a red-blood 
organization who say openly, we won't be 
driven out.” It is worthy of mention here 
that of two white men arrested in Chicago 
charged with bombing houses of Negroes 
and granted several extensions in court, one 
was a clerk in a real-estate concern. So 
obviously a cause of the Chicago violence 
was the antagonism to the expansion of the 
Negro residence district by migrants from 
the South, that the coroner proposed volun- 
tary segregation of the races in his report on 
the riots. 

Although municipal politics played their 
part in Chicago, the Omaha riot was most 
definitely and clearly inspired by antagonists 
of the city administration. Months before 


the lynching of William Brown, the local 
42 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


branch of the National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People publicly 
called attention to the danger of the cam- 
paign conducted by this Western newspaper 
under its Southern editor. Every possible 
change was rung upon police inefficiency, 
and a main item in the campaign were alarmist 
reports of unpunished attacks of Negroes 
upon white women. The chief of police of 
Omaha, in a public statement, spoke of the 
‘direct cause of riot” as being “‘the crystal- 
lization of mob spirit by vicious, unprincipled, 
and false newspaper criticisms of the police 
department.” He added that the lynching 
party which stormed the jail “was quickly 
joined by a large number of local gamblers, 
bootleggers, auto thieves, and other criminals, 
brought to the scene of the riot in taxis, 
furnished with liquor, and urged to acts of 
lawlessness of every description by the ‘gang,’ 
in hope that the present city administration 
(note that they tried to hang the mayor) 
might be overthrown and handed over to their 
organization.” “If the police administration 
is impotent to do its work,” he asks later, 
‘““why have those who live on the vices of 
unfortunate women been so active in opposing 


the police department?” 
43 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Major-General Wood, who was put in 
command of the federal troops called to 
Omaha, remarked, pointedly: “One of the first 
steps toward the preservation of law and 
order should be the suppression of a rotten 
press, where there is one. I am strong for the 
freedom of the press where it is honest and 
fearless, gives facts and not lies. Free speech, 
yes, but not free treason.”’ And on another 
occasion General Wood said, “‘With the ex- 
ception of a few men and one paper, you have 
a good city.” | 

Into the question whether the Omaha 
police department was or was not inefficient 
it is not at present necessary to go further 
than to say that the Omaha grand jury com- 
mented adversely on the conduct of the police 
forces during the strike. In any case, at the 
bottom of the Omaha lynching and of the 
riot which was diverted into attacks on 
unoffending colored men going about their 
business in the streets, was an embittered 
political controversy, having no connection 
with race and race hatred. Race hatred 
supplied the pretext upon which the political 
contest was brought violently to a focus. 

The part played by the Western newspaper 


and the Southern newspapers in fanning pas- 
44 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


sion to a dangerous point recalls Atlanta, 
and the newspaper which, according to Prof. 
Albert Bushnell Hart, “by its lurid state- 
ment of facts, large admixture of lies, and use 
of ferocious head-lines, was one of the chief 
agents in bringing about the Atlanta riots 
of 190774 

Once conceded that the Negro may be a 
decisive element in local politics—Chicago’s 
second ward, chiefly colored, having deter- 
mined the election of Mayor Thompson— 
it is obvious that feeling with regard to the 
Negro will be played upon by the press. 
Unfortunately, even the routine of the press 
associations and of the important dailies 
gives an alarmist tinge to news accounts 
concerning the Negro. It is a commonplace 
that his crimes and not his achievements 
are reported. Dean Pickens, of Morgan Col- 
lege, has made the point that if the complexion 
of red-haired men were invariably mentioned 
in head-lines in connection with crimes they 
committed, small boys would run from the 
red-haired as though from a nightmare. The 
presumption in the white press is almost 
invariably against the Negro. When feeling 
becomes tense, as it was in Washington or 


1 Albert Bushnell Hart, The Southern South, p. 70. 
45. 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Chicago, even a slight exaggeration in the re- 
ports of crimes committed by Negroes, an 
increased emphasis upon the race of the 
offender, at once attracts attention. A de- 
liberate newspaper campaign to discredit the 
Negro cannot, under the circumstances, fail 
of dangerous success. Every such campaign 
is caught up and finds its echo in the colored 
and the white press throughout the country. 
What is known as “‘tension’”’—a state of 
the public mind among colored and white 
people distinctly perceptible, but not easily 
described—increased at the time of the riots 
in other cities than the riot centers. If 
there had been a disposition to bring about a 
clash between colored and white people, in 
New York City, let us say, the best time for the 
attempt would have been immediately after 
the Chicago troubles, early in August, 1919. 
A third determinant of race riots, besides 
political intrigue and the allied arts of the 
press, is the conflict between white union 
labor and unorganized Negroes. This was 
made clear in Chicago also, where the return 
of Negro workers to the stockyards had to 
be delayed after the riots had been stilled, 
because of the hostility of white workers. 


In fact, for months after the riots small 
46 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


racial disturbances did occur. Officers of the 
Stockyards Labor Council have denied har- 
boring hostility to the Negro as Negro, and 
said they objected only to the presence of 
non-union men, Negro or white. In point of 
fact, the Negro has been and still is distrust- 
ful of unions. Too often he has had to go 
on strike only to find, when the time of 
settlement came, that the position he had left 
at the behest of his white comrades was 
filled by a white unionist. Throughout the 
South few Negroes are organized, and the 
Negro migrant carried his distrust of unions 
north with him. 

The entrance of some 50,000 Negroes into 
Chicago industry, then, was of itself enough 
to create tension. A careful estimate by the 
National League on Urban Conditions Among 
Negroes of the number placed there since the 
migration gave 40,000 men and 12,000 women. 
Thus, in the fall of 1919 the stockyards were 
employing some 8,000 Negroes; the Corn 
Products Refining Company had increased 
the number of the Negro employees from 30 
to 800 in a year, and various foundries and 
car companies each employed from 200 to 500 
Negroes. Numbers of establishments, accord- 


ing to the Urban League, endeavored to 
47 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


maintain a ratio among their employees of 
three whites to one Negro, whereas the ratio 
of Negroes to the population was as one to 
thirty. In consequence many of those estab- 
lishments ran foul of white unions and the 
Negro became a victim of the resulting 
hostility. During the steel strike numbers 
of Negroes were “‘imported,” as immigrants 
used to be induced to come to our industrial 
centers to underbid union labor. In Pitts- 
burgh it was estimated that 12,000 Negroes 
had been added to the labor supply. A 
story is told of the introduction of Negroes 
during the steel strike in one plant where 
they had not previously manned _blast-fur- 
naces. Confronted with the danger that the 
fires would go out, an officer of the company 
went to a Negro boarding-house and asked 
for twenty-five volunteers who thought they 
could operate the furnaces. He obtained the 
men, who were concealed in an engine-tender 
and driven to the mill. They kept the blast- 
furnaces going. Had the union enlisted their 
loyalty as the company was able to, the 
Negroes could not have been made an instru- 
ment for strike-breaking. For the Negro 
is no more a strike-breaker by nature than 


is the Czecho-Slovak or the Ukrainian. 
48 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


Of late, as the industrial struggle has cen- 
tered not so much about wages as about the 
right to organize and the maintenance of the 
closed shop, inducements offered to Negroes 
have often become such as to make them con- 
tent to forgo the advantages of unionization. 
This condition played its part in Chicago and 
was accountable for the fury of the Irish- 
American stockyard workers adjacent to Chi- 
eago’s “black belt.” In this respect the 
Chicago riots resembled in type the East 
St. Louis massacre of 1917. Here, where 
six thousand Negroes were driven from their 
homes, and several hundred were hanged, 
shot, burned, or beaten, the importation by 
packing companies and other establishments 
of Negro strike-breakers directly contributed 
to the disaster. At the end of May, 1917, 
something over a month before the holocaust 
burst upon East St. Louis, six hundred union 
men, including striking employees of the 
Aluminum Ore Company, marched to the 
city hall to appeal against the importation 
of more Negroes, and these men were advised 
by the leaders, according to a correspondent 
of The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “that in 
ease the authorities took no action they 


should resort to mob law.” The call to a 
4 49 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


meeting sent out by the Central Trades and 
Labor Union had spoken of the “influx of 
undesirable Negroes”? and had said, “‘ These 
men are being used to the detriment of our 
white citizens by some of the capitalists 
and a few of the real-estate owners.” Of the 
sickening horrors that occurred during the 
massacres of East St. Louis it is unnecessary 
to speak, except to point out that the display 
of hatred and passion had its root in an 
industrial problem. 

A very different set of industrial cireum- 
stances brought about the riots in Phillips 
County, Arkansas, in which some five white 
men and upward of twenty-five (some say 
more than one hundred) Negroes were killed. 
The Phillips County riots were widely heralded 
as the result of a “plot”? on the part of 
Negroes to “‘massacre whites”? and take over 
their land. Leadership in the “‘ Negro insur- 
rection”? was variously attributed to Robert 
Hill, a Negro, to O. 5S. Bratton, a white man 
arrested on a charge of murder and _ subse- 
quently released on his own recognizance 
under a purely formal indictment for “bar- 
ratry’’ or fomenting litigation, and to “‘The 
Progressive Farmers and Household Union of 


America,” an organization of Negro farmers of 
50 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


Philltps County, Arkansas. Alarmist reports 
that fifty thousand rounds of ammunition had 
been found at a Negro school were later, less 
conspicuously, corrected when the principal 
explained they had been sent there for the 
military training of the students and had no 
connection whatever with the “insurrection.” 
Investigation disclosed that the price of cotton 
and the farm-tenant system characteristic 
not only of Phillips County, Arkansas, but of 
the entire Southern cotton belt, had played an 
important part in the Phillips County trou- 
bles. The conduct of the proceedings against 
the accused Negro farm tenants bore out 
charges of oppression. Although feeling in 
Phillips County was such that no fair trial 
could possibly have been held there, they were 
tried and convicted by a jury from which 
Negroes had been excluded. A dozen Negroes 
were sentenced to be electrocuted and more 
than sixty to terms of from one to twenty-one 
years in prison. As against these sentences 
it will be recalled that many more Negroes, 
at least five Negroes for every white man, 
had been killed in the riots. The situation 
was given an entirely different color from the 
atmosphere of “‘massacre”’ and “insurrection” 


created by the press when U. S. Bratton, 
51 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


white native of Arkansas and member of a 
law firm of Little Rock, published his state- 
ment. He asserted that settlements, state- 
ments of their accounts, had been denied to 
the Negro tenants, who invariably found 
themselves in debt to their landlords at the 
end of the year; that a debt system, amount- 
ing virtually to peonage, had led the Negroes 
to organize and employ a lawyer to obtain 
legal redress; and that the riots as well as 
the court proceedings were designed to ter- 
rorize the Negro farm tenants out of asking 
for what was their due. 

Mr. Bratton had been an Assistant United 
States Attorney and had vigorously prosecuted 
cases of peonage in that part of the state of 
Arkansas. ‘This summary of the clashes about 
Elaine, Arkansas, 1s necessarily brief. It will 
be amplified later. But the bare facts suffi- 
ciently indicate that despite all romantic 
accounts of “‘Negro Paul Reveres” and their 
“night riding’”—an absurdity to any one 
who knows the conditions in Arkansas and 
in the cotton-raising South—the price of 
cotton, land tenure, the system of plantation 
stores—all played their part in bringing on 
the Arkansas riots. 


It will be seen that ett social. and 
52 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


economic motives were operative in Chicago, 
Omaha, East St. Louis, Arkansas, Washing- 
ton. It is to be assumed that riots so varied 
in their character suggest the variety of 
motive that plays about race antagonism. 
And yet the thought that arises, frequently 
unspoken, to people’s minds in connection 
with race disturbances is sex. The riots in 
Washington were universally attributed to 
“many attacks upon white women” by 
Negroes; the victim of the Omaha mob, 
which then tried to hang the mayor, was a 
Negro accused of assault upon a white woman; 
the storming of the jail in Knoxville, pre- 
ceding as it did general pillage and hood- 
lumism, had for its pretext the determination 
to lynch Maurice Mays, a Negro accused of 
assault. Of all preconceptions the one which 
fastens sexual crime to Negroes and unfail- 
ingly reverts to it in time of race conflict 
is most difficult to dispose of. The ground 
of misinformation is so firmly laid by a press 
whose campaign is based upon it that there 
is no hope of reaching newspaper readers 
with the facts. In effect, the mob spirit. 
excited by news of sexual crime differs in no 
essential from the mobbism which finds ex- 
pression in public hangings and burnings 
53 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


at stake in the Southern states. The public 
attitude toward race conflicts is deeply affected 
by the constant assertions of Southerners 
that lynching occurs for “one crime and one 
crime only”; so much so that it is found 
expedient, where a Negro man and a white 
woman have transgressed the Southern code, 
and the Negro has paid for it with his life, 
to accuse the Negro of having committed 
assault. The fact remains that, despite the 
propaganda which justifies mob murder of 
Negroes on the ground of the protection of 
white womanhood, sex antagonism was not 
the occasion of most of the race riots in this 
country. Sex jealousy has been used and 
exploited to foment hatred. Individual mob- 
bists have undoubtedly been moved by the 
passion of sex jealousy fostered not only by 
the newspapers, but by the utterances of 
Senators and Representatives in the national 
Capitol. To that extent the motives of the 
individual and of groups of the population 
may be roused, stimulated, used in the plans 
and purposes of political or business or labor 
leaders. It is hardly necessary to advert 
to the type of agitation conducted by a well- 
known Southern ex-Senator. Professor Hart 


has spoken of the “genius of Benjamin R. 
54 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


Tillman in discovering that there are more 
voters of the lower class than of the upper, 
and that he who can get the lower class to 
vote together may always be re-elected.” 
Although, Professor Hart added, Tillman 
came of a respectable middle-class family, 
yet it was his part “to show himself the 
coarsest and most vituperative of poor whites.” 
It is a type of leadership still prevalent, 
still vocal in the Senate and House of Repre- 
sentatives, still effective in newspaper offices 
and from the platform in inflaming men to 
the point where mob conflict between the 
races becomes possible. Its theme is often 
social equality, and great pains are taken to 
confuse the public mind by identifying social 
equality with race mixture. 

If the white man is deluded by the talk 
about sex and Negro criminality, the Negro 
is not. Especially clear is the Negro bour- 
geoisie, a group unknown to most white peo- 
ple because it is part of what Doctor DuBois 
has called the “‘group economy” of race in 
this country. “It consists,” said Doctor 
DuBois, “of a co-operative arrangement of 
industry and service in a group which tends 
to make the group a closed economic circle, 


largely independent of surrounding whites. 
55 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


... The Negro lawyer serves almost exclu- 
sively colored clientage, so that his existence 
is half forgotten by the white world.” 

A rough measure of the present power and 
importance of the Negro bourgeoisie is in the 
scope of its financial enterprises, its life- 
insurance companies, banking institutions, 
lodges, farms, residences, oil-wells. There 
is not space to speak of Negro colleges and 
schools, of the achievements of Negro lawyers 
and physicians and dentists, many of whom 
enjoy the best white patronage. The exist- 
ence of the Negro bourgeoisie, however, 
should be borne in mind as a determinant 
of the changed status of the Negro in the 
United States and of the Negro’s changed 
attitude toward race conflict. With the ex- 
ception of Arkansas, where the rural Negro 
was more or less at the mercy of the better 
armed and better organized white man, recent 
race riots have not been massacres. The 
Negro has shot to kill, to defend himself, 
and in a number of cases it was this cir- 
cumstance as much as the activity of local 
police or the intervention of troops which 
put an end to disorder. 

It would be exaggeration to ascribe to the — 


war the development of the “new Negro.” 
56 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


Fifty years of such progress as has been 
accomplished by the Negro race in this 
country were bound to produce more and 
more individuals who would bitterly resent 
the disabilities imposed on them merely 
and only on the pretext of the color of their 
skins and by reason of the blind prejudices 
of white men. Knowing, as Negroes bitterly 
have come to know, that vengeance is visited 
upon those of their race who advance ma- 
terially, that it is not the Negro servant, but 
the Negro landowner, teacher, physician, 
who bears the brunt of race prejudice, that, 
in short, it 1s class and not race prejudice, 
that poisons race relations, Negroes were 
bound to develop race consciousness. This 
development went hand in hand with the 
economic “group economy” which Doctor 
DuBois has described. If the white press 
omits essential interpretations of race phenom- 
ena, the Negro press of this country does not. 
White men were amazed in Civil War times 
at the rapid dissemination of news by the 
“grapevine” system of communication among 
Negroes. Now, even where colored men are 
terrorized out of distributing or buying their 
newspapers and magazines, such as The Chicago 


Defender, with its large circulation, The Crisis, 
57 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


The Messenger, The New York Age, news 
spreads from those who do succeed in obtain- 
ing and reading these and many other publica- 
tions of the race. The function of the war, 
of the better jobs, higher cotton prices, and 
opportunity in the North which it brought, 
was not to create Negro leaders, business 
men, a class of intelligent and responsible 
citizens. They had come into being before 
the war. They represented all the social 
stratification of a highly developed capitalist 
state with their own means of communica- 
tion, of finance, and instruments of industry. 
What the war taught Negroes anew was that 
they must stand together on the basis of 
color. That the hard reminders had had 
their effect was demonstrated in the race 
clashes of 1919. Substantial Negroes, who 
had hoped to keep aloof from the inevitable 
clashes of hoodlums, found themselves forced 
to buy rifles and ammunition. They found 
themselves victimized by the reports given 
currency by politicians like Vardaman, that 
**Frenchwomen-ruined niggers’? were coming 
back to this country from France to make 
trouble and to disturb the supremacy of the 
white race. More than one such Negro, 


with business responsibilities and a family 
58 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


that would have disposed him to peace, had 
peace been possible, had to consider fighting 
for his manhood, not with the ballot, but 
with the gun. That Negroes were insulted 
for no other reason than that they wore the 
uniform of the United States army, when 
on the one hand they were being taught to 
value democracy, and on the other hand were 
being taught to fight, could not fail to have 
its effect upon the attitude of the Negro 
toward the white mob. 

In effect, race riots represent a repudiation 
of civilization on the part of the group which 
initiates and tolerates them, as_ preferable 
to the tolerance on terms of equality of 
another group in that civilization. So long 
as the relations of Negro and white man in 
this country are conceived in the terms of 
the black man’s encroachment upon the 
white man’s sexual preserve there will be 
embittered hostility between the races. When 
the term “‘social equality” is divested of its 
special significance and is used literally to 
mean equal treatment for human _ beings 
on the basis of their common humanity, a 
long step will have been taken toward the 
elimination of the rope, the torch, and the 


gun from American government. When that 
59 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


new use of the term “social equality” has 
been initiated, it will be understood that, 
as Mr. Walter Lippmann has put it, we can 
give the Negro complete access to all the 
machinery of our common civilization and 
“allow him to live so that no Negro need 
dream of a white heaven and of bleached 
angels.” 

For the present, race riots and armed 
watching and waiting between the colored and 
white men in American cities show the soft 
and the rotten spots in our civilization. 
They show a press undisciplined to any sense 
of social responsibility; freedom not for the 
social inventor, but for the exploiter who 
plays his own tunes on passion; dark centers 
of poverty and crime which become the source 
of disorder that involves the best of both 
races in hostility and embittered misunder- 
standing. 

The way out is not to disarm the Negro 
and subject him to terrorism. That makes 
jailers and tyrants of white Americans. “‘ They 
won't sell us arms, but I notice they still sell 
us kerosene,’ was the remark of one colored 
man. To allow a race to advance economi- 
cally and socially, even against such obstacles 


as have confronted the Negro, and to tell 
60 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


him to remain a hewer of wood and a drawer 
of water is not only to run counter to the 
American tradition, but it is to set one’s 
face toward achieving the impossible. 

Race riots have shown, as no other phenom- 
enon of race relations in the United States, 
the complexity and variety of problems that 
confront democracy. More and more it is 
coming to be realized that the Negro is 
demanding a new orientation in the United 
States. The road to that orientation lies 
through education, improved housing and 
sanitation, increased opportunity. To per- 
mit the manifestation on the part of white 
men of distaste or hostility to a colored skin 
to determine the approach to race relations, 
or to permit an embittered assertion of class 
superiority, with skin pigmentation as its 
distinguishing mark, is to court the anarchy 
and the savagery that prevail when dark 
men gather armed in their districts to repel 
the white mob and white mobs wander the 
streets, beating to insensibility or death any 
colored man who chances to be in their way. 
More than any agency in the country the 
press can contribute to the elimination of 
race riots. For the present, local government 


is ineffective to prevent armed clashes. Usu- 
61 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


ally, when that stage has been reached, the — 
assistance of the federal government and the 
intervention of either state or federal troops 
has to be invoked. Race riots are the con- 
fession of democracy’s failure to deal with 
one of the main problems of the modern 
world—‘‘the color line,” the relation of men 
of widely different races. Ultimately the prob- 
lem must be attacked and solved within 
nations. For no nation is a homogeneous 
racial entity. The discipline of tolerance 
will be found a necessary step in the mainte- 
nance of international relations. To permit 
the enmities of the races of the world to be 
embodied in miniature within the boundaries 
of the United States is to allow a menace to 
grow of the ruin of civilization as we con- 
celve it. 

It should be said of the present tension, 
with its outbursts of race conflicts, that it 
presents encouraging aspects. The Negro 
has a stake in American civilization and he 
is willing to fight for it. Of the quality of 
life and of freedom the hard lesson is being 
learned more deeply by the Negro than by 
any class in America. Truly for many Negroes 
life and freedom are a daily conquest. The 


patience and determination and courage which 
62 


WHY RACE RIOTS? 


go into the struggle are values that no nation 
can afford to spurn. Something of respect 
for an adversary who stands his ground is 
admixed with the shame and regret of white 
communities, like Washington, which have 
tolerated riot. If the result of race riots is, 
as some observers profess to see it, a new 
standing and a new recognition of the Negro, 
as well as a new realization and race pride 
on the part of Negroes themselves, the price 
of lives lost and suffering will not have been 
exacted altogether in vain. 


Il 
THE SOUTHS COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


AD Europeans and to many Northerners 
the attitude of the Southerner toward the 
Negro is a feast of unreason. Why will a 
Southerner of caste refer affectionately to the 
colored mammy who rocked him to sleep on 
her bosom, who told him the stories that 
colored the dawning of the world upon his 
mind? Why will the same gentleman regard 
it as an insult to be asked to ride in a Pullman 
car with that mammy’s son? Why must the 
colored boy, who has played with little white 
children, pass them in the street later with 
scarcely a nod of recognition from them? 
Why is it possible, at the mere mention of 
“social equality”’ of the races, to rouse such 
fury among Southern white people that many 
a colored man has paid with his life the 
unsupported accusation of having “‘preached”’ 
that equality? To attempt to answer these 


and similar questions offhand is to disregard 
64 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR. PSYCHOSIS 


the simple fact that a set of beliefs, which are 
emotionally unified and harmonized in the 
person who holds them, often seem extrav- 
-agantly incompatible and illogical to the 
critical observer. Unfortunately for the 
South, as well as for the nation, the conse- 
quence of the typical attitude toward race 
relations is not merely an effect of illogicality 
upon the observer. The effect is the con- 
tinuance in the South of a state of feeling 
closely akin to the hysteria which swept the 
rest of the nation in the time of the World 
War. 

The Southern white man puts certain 
questions beyond the bounds of discussion. 
If they are pressed he will fight rather than 
argue. What to many educated and culti- 
vated persons of the North seems arguable 
and debatable, subject to critical examina- 
tion and referable to scientific observation, 
to the Southern white man is as sacred as 
religious dogma and is defended as passion- 
ately. In matters of social and political con- 
cern, then, many Southern white men, not 
excluding Senators and editors of the most 
powerful newspapers, act upon beliefs as 
rigid and apparently unalterable as those 


which animated the hunters of schismatics 
5) 65 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


and heretics in the early Christian Church and 
during the Middle Ages. To such minds 
any attempt to swerve or convince them is a 
sort of treason; differences of opinion, like 
differences in faith, are subject to the arbitra- 
ment of force. The state of mind, common 
as it is to all classes, with whatever exceptions 
every class affords, determines, within the 
limits of the federal constitution, the laws of 
Southern states, the enforcement of those laws, 
and all the subtleties of human relations 
which are not reflected in court cases. The 
result is not a stable human society, but a 
balance of power. Where men may not pub- 
licly express dissent unless in fear of ostracism, 
where social standing and, in many communi- 
ties, tolerable existence depend upon very 
definitely prescribed orthodoxy, it is not assent, 
but power that determines the continuance 
of a social and industrial system based on 
that orthodoxy. The question of the Negro’s 
status in the South is quite generally disposed 
of by the assertion that the South is a “‘white 
man’s country” and must remain so. The 
position cannot be justified on grounds of 
any general political or social principles ap- 
plicable to human beings in general, without 
either specifically excepting the Negro as a 
66 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


class from the application of those prin- 
ciples or declaring that he is not a human 
being. In practice both expedients are re- 
sorted to. 

But the Negro, where he acquires economic 
power, farms, Liberty bonds, oil-wells, thea- 
ters, education, medical and legal training, 
constantly narrows the field which may be 
interposed between himself and common 
humanity. It is very difficult to show that 
the man is not a human being who can ad- 
minister a three-thousand-acre farm; who 
can represent the United States as consul— 
with diplomatic responsibilities—in Latin 
America; who can perform difficult and 
delicate surgical operations; who writes poetry 
and music, conducts banks and life-insurance 
companies. When this denial of power be- 
comes a reductio ad absurdum on the basis 
of any test of ability or aptitude which may 
be advanced, the recourse is always to some- 
thing inherent in color. Every successful 
colored man, then, becomes living disproof 
of the 100-per-cent. Southerner’s theorem. 

The symptoms of the South’s state of mind 
are forms of repression which the North would 
resort to only under the threat of war and 


toward enemies or those believed to be 
67 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


sympathizing with and aiding the enemy.! 
There is no crime so heinous that it puts the 
offender in civilized communities outside the 
field of court procedure. In almost all coun- 
tries pretending to civilization the accused 
is entitled, as a matter of course, to trial to 
determine if he be guilty or not. That is not 
the case in many portions of the South. 
Public men, where they do not participate 
in the mob murder without trial of colored 
men, frequently condone or approve it. It 
is not uncommon for a newspaper editorial 
to urge that the exponent of an unpopular 
doctrine be “‘lynched.”’ Where else than in 
the Southern states of the United States 
would it be possible to remove a man from a 
railway train and beat him within an inch 
of his life because, being colored, he had 
dared to purchase Pullman accommodations 
for his two daughters, on their journey to a 
Southern university of standing? To all 
questions that may be raised as to the pro- 
priety of using force and threats of it in 
administering race relations, the reply is 
that by that means they are “‘settled.”’ The 


1 This statement becomes theoretical since the hysterical outburst 
of radical baiting'and hunting of “Reds” which took place in Northern 
cities late in 1919 and early in 1920. 

68 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


answer leaves much to be desired. The 
“settlement” is accompanied by serious dis- 
advantages. Uneasy lies the Southerner’s 
head whose ascendancy, like the king’s, de- 
pends upon repression. He is tied to a 
slavery worse almost than physical enslave- 
ment. His thoughts and preoccupations are 
chained to color and the problems race 
relations occasion. In commenting upon the 
riots at Vicksburg in 1874, Garner speaks of 
“the dread of Negro insurrection, which 
has at one time or another darkened every 
hearthstone in the South”’; rumors of upris- 
ing, massacre, plotting by Negroes, appeared 
in many newspapers during 1919, created 
intense anxiety, and provoked violent counter- 
measures. Agrarian and almost entirely eco- 
nomic as the origin of the disturbances in 
Arkansas proved to have been, the newspapers 
not only of the South, but throughout the 
nation, reflected the fear of revolt, massacre, 
and uprising which is never blotted entirely 
out of the mind of the white citizens of the 
South. 

Something more than analogy 1s possible 
between what the nation had to believe of 
the individual German when it was fighting 


Germany and what the South habitually 
69 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


believes of the Negro. It is difficult to 
generate enough enthusiasm to fight a man 
unless you hate him; and it is difficult to 
hate him unless you believe him better, in 
some respects, than yourself and are jealous, 
or conceive him utterly unworthy of human 
consideration, a beast, degenerate, criminal. 
In neither case are you in a position to discuss 
any questions which may be raised as to your 
relations to the individual. He is enemy, 
and hate or contempt is justified in wreaking 
itself upon him and upon his protagonists. 
Many Southerners protest they have intense 
and sympathetic affection for individual 
Negroes such as is not found elsewhere in the 
United States. That may or may not be 
true of certain individuals. But let the 
Negro insist, not upon affectionate condescen- 
sion, but upon his full prerogatives as a man 
and a citizen of the United States, and his 
most devoted Southern friends will relegate 
him to the position the “Hun” occupied 
during the war. 

That this condition of the public mind is 
due not to something inherent in race there 
are numerous indications. “No people,” says 
Bryce, ““was ever prouder than the Romans, 


nor with better reason. Yet, though in the 
: 70 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


fullness of their strength they held them- 
selves called by Fate to rule the world, they 
showed little contempt for their provincial 
subjects and no racial aversion.”’! In the 
ancient world, dark skin, as Bryce points out, 
excited little or no repulsion. His valuable 
survey suggests to him “that down till the 
days of the French Revolution there had 
been very little in any country, or at any 
time, of self-conscious racial feeling.” In 
those countries where race hatred has been 
thought to be most active as a motive, Bryce 
has shown the play of other forces: in Hun- 
gary and Transylvania it was “‘not till some 
time after the Napoleonic wars” that there 
began to be “talk of antagonism between 
Magyars, whether nobles or peasants, and 
the subject Slavs or Rumans.”’ It is never- 
theless a matter of record that the Magyar 
conceived the Slovaks as being not human. 
In Bohemia the quarrels of Czechs with the 
smaller German element “‘were not purely 
racial, but complicated with the religious 
disputes of the Hussites and the orthodox 
Catholics, and with scholastic disputes be- 
tween the Nominalists (mostly Germans) 

1 Viscount Bryce, “Race Sentiment as a Factor in History.’ A 


lecture delivered before the University of London, February 22, 1915. 
71 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


and the Realist party, which embraced the 
bulk of Czech teachers and students.” As 
regards Ireland, “‘the sentiment of a separate 
Irish nationality seems to date from the 
strife, first over land and then over religion 
also, which began in the time of Elizabeth.” 
Yet although national feeling, ““even in the 
days of the United Irishmen and the rebellion 
of 1798 . . . was not distinctively racial,” it 
was treated as such by those Englishmen 
who proved that the Irish were inferior. 
Even to-day in the Western Hemisphere the 
very Negro who, it is believed by so many 
white Americans, occasions insurmountable 
obstacles to the maintenance of civilization, 
is absorbed and assimilated. In Brazil, whose 
Negro population is most numerous of the 
Latin-American republics, there is no race 
feeling against intermarriage. Persons of 
mixed blood are considered white and augment 
the white population. “‘The result is so far 
satisfactory,” says Bryce, “‘that there is 
little or no class friction. The white man 
does not lynch or maltreat the Negro; indeed, 
I have never heard of a lynching anywhere in 
South America except occasionally as part 
of a political convulsion. The Negro is not 


accused of insolence and does not seem to 
72 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


develop any more criminality than naturally 
belongs to any ignorant population with 
loose notions of morality and property.” ! 

Three conclusions are suggested by Bryce 
from his South American observations, of 
which two are especially pertinent: The 
first that a race, the result of fusion of two 
parent stocks, is not necessarily inferior to the 
stronger parent or superior to the weaker; 
the second that “‘race repugnance is no 
such constant and permanent factor in human 
affairs as members of the Teutonic peoples 
are apt to assume. Instead of being, as we 
Teutons suppose, the rule in this matter, 
we are rather the exception,” and history as 
well as observation of our world seems to 
suggest “that since the phenomenon is not 
of the essence of human nature, it may not 
be always so strong among the Teutonic 
peoples as it is to-day.” 

The exceptional phenomenon, then, which 
invidiously distinguishes white Americans from 
Mohammedans, Chinese, the Latin races, is 
referable to something not essentially different 
from Jewish pride. If the Jew was born to 
teach, the Anglo-Saxon was born to rule. 

1 James Bryce, South America, 1912. New York: The Macmillan 


Company. P. 480. 
73 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


On the blood of the Jew a religious inheritance 
had set a high price; on the blood of the 
Anglo-Saxon a political tradition of far more 
recent date, due in large measure to Norman 
heritage. Every race so distinguished, not 
biologically, but by its own cult of superiority, 
by its traditions and its self-interpretation, 
becomes to that degree an only child of God, 
spoiled and hated. Science has not meant the 
extinction of God; but it has sounded the 
doom of tribal and racial gods. And in 
science’s twilight of the gods lurks the promise 
of a brighter dawn in which races will be 
valued not by any scale of superior or inferior, 
quantitatively, but as different colors in civ- 
ilization, qualitatively different. 

If the effect of the Southerner’s assumptions 
is to make him believe the Negro to be racially 
inferior, he must resent proof to the contrary. 
It is proper for an inferior race to serve, to 
hew wood and draw water, to pick cotton, to 
work the farm. It is a reversal of the divine 
plan for the inferior to aspire to the seats of 
the mighty, to want to become postmasters 
in Southern towns, or aldermen. The divine 
plan is, like most plans, subject to interpreta- 
tion. It precludes voting for Negroes south 


of the Ohio River in the opinion of some. But 
74 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


Atlanta, Georgia, is south of the Ohio River 
and Negroes of Atlanta vote for President 
of the United States. In 1919 the Negroes 
of Atlanta defeated at the polls a proposal to 
issue bonds because the white citizens had 
not agreed to equitable expenditure of the 
proceeds on Negro schools. This was also 
contrary to the divine plan. 

The insistence on divine plan, on dogma, 
always implies a process of rationalization. 
The believer maintains his point of view with 
desperate insistence, not by accumulating 
facts and reasoning from them. That process, 
the result of idle curiosity and dispassionate 
investigation, deals death to dogma. But 
rationalization is the process of interpreting 
the facts with reference to beliefs arrived at 
before the facts are examined. That is what 
poisons race relations in the South and in a 
measure affects the thinking of all Americans 
on the subject. The dogmatist on the sub- 
ject of race inferiority not only resists rea- 
soning, he resists fact. ‘The despised literary 
gentlemen of the North, sometimes known as 
‘“nigger-lovers,” discuss the undebatable, or, 
as a Negro preacher once put it, unscrew 
the inscrutable. 


What are typical Southern attitudes toward 
75 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


the race question? ‘There are many, and a 
statement of each would be emphatically repu- 
diated by a large part of the population 
to which it was attributed. The cultivated 
Southern gentleman of the middle-class family 
which knows Negroes chiefly as house servants, 
as tradesmen, or even as artisans would dis- 
sent from the expressions used by the poor 
white. Historically the relations between 
the Negro and the ruling classes of the South 
have often been closer than those between the 
Southerner of lineage and culture and the 
poor white. In fact, the colored man, by 
the account of one of his own spokesmen, who 
acted as Speaker of the Mississippi legislature 
during Reconstruction days, preferred the 
aristocrat of the past. Even during slavery 
days their relations had been cordial and 
friendly. Women of the best white families 
had taught and cared for slaves, had con- 
ducted religious services, and had maintained 
personal relations which were regarded as 
their duty and were their pride. Where the 
white aristocrat had sometimes harbored a 
tolerance which came of affectionate con- 
descension and was reinforced by a realization 
of the material advantages of the enforced 


associations, the poor white felt antipathy 
76 


uaa ee Ee rl eee 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


and jealousy. The Negro, in his eyes, was 
an instrument of oppression, a competitor 
in the industrial market, whose function 
it was to undercut the white artisan’s wages 
and to degrade him. It was not long after 
the introduction of slaves before plantation- 
owners learned that Negro slaves could be 
used as carpenters, shoemakers, plasterers, 
painters, blacksmiths, drivers of teams. “Al- 
though the slaves were not responsible for this 
condition,” says Lynch, “‘the fact that they 
were there and were thus utilized created a 
feeling of bitterness and antipathy on the part 
of the laboring whites which could not be 
easily wiped out.” ! 

The growth of large plantations, the relega- 
tion of the poor white to less fertile areas, 
the same conditions which have always mili- 
tated against immigration of foreigners to 
the South on any appreciable scale, have con- 
trived to keep this animosity alive. The 
poor white had this much compensation, 
however: ‘‘A white man was always a white 
man,’ as Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart points 
out, “‘and as long as slavery endured, the 
poorest and most ignorant of the white race 

1 John R. Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction, 1915. New York: 


Neale Publishing Co. P. 108. 
V7 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


could always feel that he had something to 
look down upon, that he belonged to the lords 
of the soil. In the war he was blindly and 
unconsciously fighting for the caste of white 
men, and could not be brought to realize 
that slavery helped to keep him where he was, 
without education for his children, without 
opportunities for employment, without that 
ambition for white paint and green blinds 
which has done so much to raise the Northern 
settler.” ! 

The Civil War has been aptly called a rich 
man’s war and a poor man’s fight. The 
motives, then, for antagonism between poor 
white and Negro have been among the 
most powerful common to human beings— 
jealousy and pride. In industry the white 
artisan hated the Negro as a favored com- 
petitor. This hatred was bound to find ex- 
pression in the fields in which the white man 
was favored—the political and social. It was 
a form of compensation that, poor as the 
white might be, he was yet kin with the owner 
and master of slaves, could afford to despise 
and insult the black man. Strange as it may 
seem, on the ground that they were extrav- 
agantly administered and meant heavy taxa- 


1 The Southern South, p. 40. 
78 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


tion—surely no sore burden on the poor 
whites as a class—the introduction of public 
schools during Reconstruction days met with 
the most determined opposition, even from 
the poor whites themselves, whose status 
the schools might have been expected to im- 
prove. Fifty or sixty years is a short space 
in which to change feelings so deeply ingrained 
as hatred for black men on the part of poor 
whites. Even yet it is operative and plays 
its part in preventing absorption of colored 
workmen in white unions, introducing new 
industrial problems and the hates and dis- 
trusts consequent upon mutual exclusiveness. 
The white man’s feelings of superiority are 
still played upon for political profit and are 
linked, by processes which might be examined 
in detail, to the most powerful of man’s 
impulses and emotions—those related to sex. 

“The last fatal campaign in Georgia which 
culminated in the Atlanta massacre,” says 
Doctor DuBois, “was an attempt, fathered 
by conscienceless politicians, to arouse the 
prejudices of the rank and file of white laborers 
and farmers against the growing competition 
of black men, so that black men by law could 
be forced back to subserviency and serfdom. 


It succeeded so well that smoldering hate 
79 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


burst into flaming murder before the politi- 
cians could curb it.” 

In the South, the chivalresque notions of 
human intercourse, with their picturesqueness 
and their disadvantages, survived longer than 
elsewhere in the United States. The beauties 
of the old régime are sometimes overdrawn, 
just as the historian of the court functions of 
the time of Louis XIV often forgets to describe 
the odors which, in the absence of sanitation, 
almost caused the stoutest ambassadors and 
perfumed, bewigged, buckled, and laced gentle- 
men to faint. Like any civilization whose 
eyes are blinded to the substructure of misery 
and desolation upon which it rests, its charms 
are canonized. The divine right of kings 
has never been affirmed with more certitude 
than the right of the white aristocrat of the 
South to rule and to profit from the enforced 
servitude of the black man. The chivalresque 
tradition which was exemplified in the ideal 
animating the aristocratic South no less than 
in the romances of medieval Europe em- 
phasized not inquiry, service, labor such as 
is the badge of distinction among scientists. 
It rewarded personal prowess, sportsmanship, 
courtesy, and, in matters intellectual, con- 


formity. Properly cultivated, the chivalresque 
80 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


tradition has much to give to this country, 
perhaps through such Southern gentlemen 
as preserve appreciation of values less tem- 
poral than those measurable by the dollar 
or by popular acclaim. But on the relations 
of the races the effect of the chivalresque 
traditions was almost uniformly bad. It 
led men to assert as permanent and immutable 
a system whose consequences they did not 
stop to examine. It transmuted to romance, 
faith, nobility, and a whole dictionary of 
appealing terms attitudes grounded in base 
pecuniary considerations. Toward any in- 
vestigation into its own foundations it per- 
petuated an attitude of condemnation as 
toward sacrilege. 

‘““Nothing was so prejudicial to slavery,” 
says Professor Hart, “as the attempt to 
silence the Northern abolitionists; for a 
social system that was too fragile to be dis- 
cussed was doomed to be broken.” 

It is too often assumed that the Civil War 
broke that system. It survives still, subject 
to a subtler process of disintegration than 
war, leaving its last records not only in 
memoirs and mellow reminiscences, but in 
blood, violence, terror, and hatred. Many 


Southern white men of the laboring classes 
6 81 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


deplore the industrial policy of divide et impera, 
which is used to exploit both them and colored 
men. So do many Southern white men of 
the possessing and industrial classes deplore 
the exploitation of the Negro politically and 
industrially. The attitude of these dissenters, 
however, is not typical of preponderant 
groups; and it is not vocal. An iron con- 
formity is still clamped upon the South and 
holds to its standards him who would remain 
a part of its political, social, and industrial 
activities. 

Before the Civil War white aristocrats 
were never put in any position in which they 
might be forced into competition with the 
Negro. Manual labor finds no place in a 
chivalresque tradition. It was the part of 
the white man to administer, to superintend, 
to plan. Further, manual labor was made a 
social criterion which even now, in more 
advanced civilizations, except in the case of 
the sculptor, painter, musician, and crafts- 
man, divides the “upper” from the “lower” 
classes. To a degree the distinction survives 
in that the prejudice against the colored man 
is now directed against those who “rise” 
above the socially inferior laboring class. 
This social prejudice plays easily into the 

82 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


industrial need for a large supply of cheap 
labor. 

“In the last analysis,’ remarks Professor 
Hart, “most of the objections to Negro 
education come down to the assertion that it 
puts the race above the calling whereunto 
God hath appointed it. The argument goes 
back to the unconscious presumption that the 
Negro was created to work the white man’s 
field, and that even a little knowledge makes 
him ambitious to do something else.” 

There is even yet a large body of opinion 
in the South which would deny the Negro 
education, not only because ignorance makes 
him a source of exploitable labor, but because 
it debars him from participation in_ the 
prerogative of the superior race—ruling by 
political processes. When it was undreamed 
of that colored men might vote, participation 
was not a class distinction. As soon as the 
vote and office-holding became an_ issue, 
it became as sacred as a dogma that the 
Negro was unfit politically, as that industrially 
he was unfit for anything but the rougher 
and more arduous kinds of labor. But the 
economic advance of the Negro, the growth 
of a Negro bourgeoisie, has threatened these 


assumptions. With wealth and the advan- 
83 


b 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


tages that wealth brings at his command, 
many a Negro threatens the white man’s 
complacence. It is against the advancing, 
prosperous colored man, therefore, that fury 
is frequently directed. If a Negro, outside 
of the few large Southern cities, presumes to 
dress well, he is known as a “dude nigger.” 
Many a Negro in large Southern cities, even, 
is confronted daily with signs informing 
him that dogs and Negroes are not permitted 
in the public parks, thus making it clear 
that, whatever his competency, education, 
and sensibilities, racial barriers are immutable. 

“The whole South,’ remarks Professor 
Hart, “‘is full of evidence not so much that 
the whites think the Negroes inferior, as that 
they think it necessary to fix upon him some 
public evidence of inferiority, lest mistakes 
be made.” 

“Tt not infrequently happens,” says the 
Department of Labor’s report on Negro 
Migration in 1916-17, “that the Negro who 
obviously makes money and gets out of 
debt is dismissed from the plantation, a 
common expression being that as soon as a 
Negro begins to make money he is no longer 
of any account.” 


The evidence as to the humiliations to 
84 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


which Negroes are subject in large cities of 
the South is so voluminous that it is hardly 
necessary to adduce it here. The quality 
of treatment accorded respectable colored 
people, however, is suggested in another pas- 
sage from the Labor Department’s report: 

“Most of the larger Southern cities not only 
exclude Negroes from their fine parks, but 
make little or no provisions for the recreation 
of the colored people. Harassing, humiliat- 
ing ‘Jim-Crow’ regulations surround Negroes 
on every hand and invite unnecessarily severe 
and annoying treatment from the public 
and even from public servants. To avoid 
trouble, interference, and even injury, Negroes 
must practise eternal vigilance in the streets 
and on common carriers. The possibilities 
of trouble are greatly increased if the colored 
men are accompanied by their wives, daugh- 
ters, or sweethearts. For then they are more 
likely to resent violently any rough treatment 
or abuse, and insulting language, whether 
addressed directly to them or to the women. 
Colored women understand this so well that 
they frequently take up their own defense 
rather than expose their male friends to the 
danger of protecting them.” 


It will be appreciated to what extent 
85 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


absolutist distinctions are made on the basis 
of color, fortified by traditional, mdustrial, 
and political considerations, when it is remem- 
bered that the chivalresque culture demands 
the protection of womanhood from violence, 
from insult, even, at the cost of life itself. 
Subject to forces of attrition, the white man’s 
scheme of the South constitutes: a closed 
system, intolerable to the manhood and 
womanhood—provided manhood and woman- 
hood be conceded to them—of any individuals 
of whatever race who are subjected to it. 
Fortified as it is by dogma, exempt from 
examination or discussion, the imposition of 
it remains, as has been stated, a matter of 
force majeure. The nation is no longer 
divided against itself to the extent that it 
was before the Civil War. But the South 
is divided against itself to an extent known 
only to Southerners, especially Southern 
colored people. The World War, which might 
have been expected to override waves of 
dissent, to engulf in an emotional flood of 
national sentiment all but irreconcilable dif- 
ferences, intensified the strains and stresses 
which race feeling has imposed upon the social 
structure of the Southern states. The War 


Department encountered fierce resistance to 
86 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


the quartering of colored troops in Southern 
communities, in fact to the enlistment and 
training of colored men; although the draft 
boards, from which colored men were excluded, 
discriminated in the matter of exemptions 
and certifications against Negroes. The net 
effect upon white Americans of the service of 
Negroes in the armies of the United States 
was a dangerous increase in bitterness and 
resentment, a determination to “show the 
nigger’? when he returned from service that 
the equality to some extent imposed by the 
United States government in its military 
arm was not to affect political or social 
relations when the emergency had passed. 

A balance in any such social system is pos- 
sible only when the victims of that system 
are thoroughly cowed. Meanwhile that bal- 
ance is represented by peculiar phrases and 
attitudes not common to the rest of the 
country. Thus to be “‘radical’’ elsewhere 
than in the South has signified general politi- 
cal liberalism of a sort more or less extreme. 
In the South to be radical has meant to most 
people an intolerable attitude on race relations, 
to wit, a tendency to espouse the cause of the 
“nigger.” The word “radical” took on its 


significance in Civil] War and Reconstruction 
87 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


days. Because the board of trustees of a 
Mississippi educational institution included 
‘‘carpet-baggers”’ and native Republicans, 
The Jackson Clarion voiced its abhorrence in 
these terms: 

“The people have revolted at the thought 
of placing their sons under radical patronage, 
when the country abounds with schools uncor- 
rupted by radical influences.” ! 

Times have changed. Republicans else- 
where may be reactionary, stand-pat, conser- 
vative, or any shade between; but in many 
communities of the South to vote Republican 
is to “vote nigger’ and be a dangerous or 
contemptible “radical,” unworthy of asso- 
ciation with decent people. It will readily 
be seen that thereby certain bounds are set 
to that flexibility of political discussion which 
is supposed to be characteristic of so experi- 
mental and undogmatic a form of government 
as democracy. Only the most thundering 
acceptance of current claptrap about Negro 
inferiority, the most obvious pandering to 
prejudice, hatred, and apprehension, will meet 
the public mind dominated by such obsessions 
as have been suggested. When the balance 
of that system is disturbed, because it is sus- 


1 Quoted by Garner, op. cit., footnote p. 368. 
88 





THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


pected that victims may resist, political 
discussion enters a more violent phase, in 
which all white men become a tribe massed 
and gathered to fight for its very existence. 
There are, of course, those who stand above 
and aside from the battle. But they are not 
elected to the Senate or the House of Repre- 
sentatives; they write few editorials. 
Violence in the South is not only always 
imminent; it is actual. “‘Lawlessness,” says 
Professor Hart—and hundreds of other ob- 
servers will corroborate him—‘‘is the plague 
of the South. . . . The number of homicides 
and mob murders is not so serious as the 
continual appeals to violence by editors and 
public men who are accepted as leaders by 
a large minority and sometimes a majority 
of the white people.”” “The commonest form 
of terror,” he says later, “is lynching, a 
deliberate attempt to keep the race down 
by occasionally killing Negroes sometimes 
because they are dreadful criminals, fre- 
quently because they are bad, or loose- 
tongued, or influential, or are acquiring 
property, or otherwise irritate the whites.” 
Many a white Southerner will confess in 
casual conversation that he believes it neces- 


sary to “lynch a nigger” now and then in 
89 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


order that they may be kept in their place; 
and what that place is in the white South- 
erner’s estimation has been sufficiently indi- 
cated. Meanwhile the bonds of personal 
relationship which used to mitigate the hos- 
tility of races under slavery, when white 
aristocrat and colored people had points of 
contact, are steadily being dissolved. Testi- 
mony is almost unanimous to the effect that 


— 


i tt ee 


the gap between white people of standing — 


and Negroes is being widened. 


In Reconstruction days the white men and — 


women who came from New England to 
teach in Negro schools were unable to obtain 
board or lodging in the homes of Southern 
white people and often had to live with 
Negroes. ‘Living upon terms of social equal- 
ity with the Negroes was a grave offense 
in the eyes of the Southern white,” says 
Garner, “and was sure to cost the offender 
whatever respect the community might other- 
wise have entertained for him.” 

Of the teachers who were whipped and the 
schools burned, of the teacher who was 
charged by the Ku-Klux with “associating 
with Negroes in preference to the white race 
as God ordained,” the trace survives. Then it 


was deemed a disgrace for a woman to teach 
90 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


in a Negro school. It is a practice scarcely 
more honored now than it was, although the 
insult which accompanied has to some degree 
fallen away. But the breach between white 
and colored people remains and widens. 

Of the colored man’s attitude toward the 
social system of the South, the white man 
who “knows the nigger’ is almost entirely 
ignorant. Few if any white men ever enter 
Negro homes; they do not attend Negro 
meetings or churches. They are not spoken 
to frankly, except by certain colored men 
who are terrorized or bribed into syco- 
phancy. Few Negroes trust the Southern 
white man; and although their commerce 
may be amiable and peaceable, it is seldom 
the white man knows what the Negro is 
thinking. But the Negro knows the white 
man’s thoughts. He knows because members 
of his race are in constant association with 
and attendance upon the whites; and, too, 
there are many Negroes of so light complexion 
that unless they are personally known they 
are indistinguishable from white men. That 
circumstance, in the event of tension and 
imminent violence, makes the maintenance 
of secrecy a matter of difficulty for the 


“superior” race. 
91 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


It will be noticed that the discussion of 
race relations at this point becomes a con- 
sideration of a potential state of war. That 
condition becomes more and more a menace 
as the Negro advances, as he decides that he 
will fight and die rather. than be lynched, 
Jim-Crowed, terrorized, browbeaten, and 
robbed. It was not until the migration 
reached its height and Southern plantations 
and farms were being seriously depleted of 
labor that a process of soul-searching began 
which found its echo even in editorials of the 
Negro’s bitterest antagonists among the press. 
Said The Daily News, of Jackson, Mississippi: 

“We allow petty officers of the law to 
harass and oppress our Negro labor, mulcting 
them of their wages, assessing stiff fines on 
trivial charges, and often they are convicted 
on charges which if preferred against a white 
man would result in prompt acquittal.” ! 

The Charlotte Observer remarked that “the 
real thing that started the exodus lies at the 
door of the farmer and is easily within his 
power to remedy. The Negro must be given 
better homes and better surroundings. Fifty 
years after the Civil War he should not be 
expected to be content with the same con- 


1 Quoted in Negro Migration in 1916-17. U.S. Labor Department. 
92 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


ditions which existed at the close of the 
Walone 

The white South’s first response to the 
migration was, as might have been expected, 
violent resentment. It is not much good 
being a superior race if the inferior race moves 
away. Doubtless the beginning of the north- 
ward movement was assisted by the ravages 
of the boll weevil in the Southwest. But the 
migration continued and grew and it was borne 
in upon the most unobservant that among 
the many motives which prompted Negroes 
to leave the South was a desire for educational 
opportunities for their children, for human 
and kindly intercourse, for citizenship and 
the vote. Blind as the nation had been to 
the failure of attempts to “settle”? problems 
of race relations by violence and terrorism, 
murder and lynching, mitigated if at all by 
condescension, it could not disregard the 
evidence presented by the northward migra- 
tion and by the imminence of armed violence 
in many Southern cities. When it is deemed 
necessary, in anticipation of the use of re- 
volvers and guns, to stop selling them to 
Negroes, although the sale to whites goes on 
unchecked, it would seem the part of wisdom 


1 Quoted in Negro Migration in 1916-17. U.S. Labor Department. 
93 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


to delve into the resentment which turns 
finally for redress not to courts, but to desperate 
self-defense. Conditions such as_ prevailed 
in 1919 were doubtless in part due to that 
vague diffusion of discontent and assertions 
aftér the war known as “unrest.” But any 
such system as prevailed and as still prevails 
in the Southern states of the United States 
was bound to arrive at a point where read- 
justment, either by intelligent direction or 
in violent conflict, would be unavoidable. 

It may be thought that the characteriza- 
tion of relations between the races in the South 
bears unduly upon the shortcomings of the 
Southern white man. In point of fact, it 
would be difficult to exaggerate the ignorance 
and brutality characteristic of many rural 
communities. ‘There are, of course, vast num- 
bers of middle-class and cultivated people 
very much like similar populations elsewhere. 
But they are perforce silent and acquiescent 
in the system of thought which is formed, 
as I have suggested, by inheritance, by eco- 
nomic and political considerations, and is 
made effectual not by the people who deplore 
excesses, but by the many who are wanting 
in civilized inhibitions. Rarely, unless by 


such a catastrophe as the Atlanta riots, is 
94 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


the better sentiment of citizens roused to 
the self-assertion which makes repetition of 
such horrors impossible. Even now there are 
persons who foresee progressive degeneration 
of good will among white and black men, 
not because elsewhere in the world there is 
lacking demonstration that a modus vivendi 
could be devised, but because most of the 
effective forces playing upon race relations at 
present, such as the press, public discussion, 
industrial policy, are contriving to intensify 
and make more malignant the disease of 
hatred and misunderstanding which afflicts 
those relations. 

“Tf the South would keep the Negro and 
have him satisfied,” says Mr. W. T. B. 
Williams in his report to the Labor Depart- 
ment, “she must give more constructive 
thought than has been her custom to the 
Negro and his welfare.” 

Decent wages, schools—‘‘miserable make- 
shifts,” The Jackson Daily News called the 
rural schools for Negro children—high schools, 
of which now there are almost none for 
Negro boys and girls; abatement of “Jim 
Crow” legislation and restrictions; safety 
from mob violence and lynching; “protection 


against constant irritation, insult, and abuse 
95 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


for no reason other than that he is a black 
man’’—these are among the prescriptions for 
more tolerable conditions in the Southern 
states. If it were not for the color of the 
victims, the nation would rise in anger and 
abhorrence and see to it that the conditions 
which now prevail were remedied. If it is 
found troublesome or even unprofitable to 
attempt a cure of such deep-seated malignancy 
as the ignorance and prejudice and _ self- 
seeking which controls the relations of the 
races in this country, it will in the long run 
be found more unprofitable and troublesome 
not to attempt-a cure. The South’s “color 
psychosis,” as I have called the instability 
and excitability of the public mind with 
reference to race, affects its entire life. It 
affects the choice of men to represent the 
South in the councils of the nation and 
thereby affects national policy for mternal 
and on foreign affairs. 

“The experiment,” said Nathaniel South- 
gate Shaler, “of combining in a democratic so- 
ciety, In somewhere near equal numbers, two 
such widely separated races as the Aryans and 
Negroes has never been essayed. . . . It may 
as well be confessed that a true democracy, 


social as well as political, is impossible in 
96 


THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS 


such conditions, and that any adjustment 
which may be effected must have many of the 
qualities of an oligarchy.” 1 

There is no objection to the frank recognition 
of such a proposition as Doctor Shaler put 
forward and to acquiescence in it. But to 
proclaim democracy; to shout freedom and 
equality, and actually to maintain that pseudo- 
democracy by oppression and terrorism which 
compares favorably with the best efforts 
of the Turk in Armenia; to divorce the lan- 
guage of the politician and statesman so 
completely from the terms of the life he 
represents that every intelligent and enlight- 
ened man must smile at his pronouncements; 
to make integrity impossible because the 
South and the nation cannot face the deep 
division within itseli—is to poison at their 
source the aspirations of the men whose faith 
looks forward to societies untainted by vio- 


lence. 
7 1 The Neighbor, p. 180. 


IV 
ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


“J NEXORABLE doctrines on the inequality 

of human beings,’ says Jean Finot, 
adorned with a scientific veneer, are multi- 
plied to infinity. . . . Despotic, cruel, and 
full of confidence in their laws, the creators 
and partizans of all these doctrines do their 
best to impose them as dogmas of salvation 
and infallible guides for humanity.” ! The 
methods used to establish the inequalities of 
which M. Finot speaks are almost as various 
as the doctrines themselves. Some persons 
proceed from a dissected human brain and 
a set of scales to draw conclusions applicable 
to the politics of a fifth-rate village. Others, 
their senses sharpened to a degree which would 
make any dog envious, detect race by odor, 
as the hero of Shaw’s Pygmalion could detect 
nativity by accent. Given an absence of 


€6 


1 Jean Finot, Race Prejudice, translated by Florence Wade-Evans, 
1907. New York: E. P. Dutton Co. 
98 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


irony and self-criticism in a community as 
orthodox as the Southern states, the most 
extreme statements find adherents. Asser- 
tions which, isolated from their context of 
assumptions and passions, would be sharply 
challenged become commonplace. In any 
attempt upon race relations, then, before it is 
useful to suggest plans and procedure, it is 
necessary to clear away the intellectual rub- 
bish that prevents even formulation of the 
problems. Especially is this true of the 
relations of Negro and white in the United 
States; for mm no civilized community in the 
world are more amazing assumptions current 
and confident affirmations made with less 
solid knowledge to which to refer them. 

M. Finot himself speaks of the effect which 
the ideas of Gobineau exercised upon the 
philosophy of modern Germany. It was 
Gobineau, it will be recalled, who discovered 
that the best of civilization is due to the 
Germanic races, whose blood sustains modern 
society. He it was who as much as any one 
man popularized in Germany the notion of 
superior and inferior races. “It has been 
found,” remarks M. Finot, in comment, “‘that 
Gobinism displayed too much pessimism in 


the face of too little knowledge, and that even 
99 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


its ideas of barbarous and inferior peoples 
lacked clearness.” But the United States 
has its own Gobinism which takes over 
almost bodily his style of argumentation and 
the assertions made later, under the influence 
of Darwinism, by Lapouge. If universal his- 
tory becomes “reduced to the history of the 
variations of cerebral structures,’ many 
Americans would extend the process from 
history to prophecy and predict the future 
on the basis of cranial measurements. In 
this connection there is more than passing 
interest in M. Finot’s statement that for 
Gobineau “it is only a matter of bringing 
his contributions to the great struggle against 
equality and the emancipation of the prole- 
tariat.”” For the American Negro has been 
the proletarian par excellence, and the motives 
to keep him a proletarian have been strong. 

It is the evangelist, animated by religious 
fervor and race patriotism, that presents the 
extreme of opinion on race matters in this 
country. He is as devoted to racial purities 
and ascendancies as was ever an apologist of 
Teutonic hegemony. The evangelist’s state- 
ments, unlike the propositions hazarded by 
scientists, have the advantage of being true 


for all time. No apology is necessary, there- 
100 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


fore, for offermg mm evidence the remarkable 
information with which an American regaled 
the world so long ago as 1905 in The Color 
line, whose subtitle reads, “A Brief in 
Behalf of the Unborn.” The author, William 
Benjamin Smith, wrote from Tulane Uni- 
versity. It is safe to say that the beliefs and 
opinions he voiced at a time when the South 
was smarting under the sting of the invitation 
to dine extended by President Roosevelt to 
Booker T. Washington still pass current. 
What is the main issue for Mr. Smith? 
How does he attack the manifold questions 
of judicial procedure, office-holding, trade- 
unionism, municipal politics, housing? His 
answer is simple: The South “stands for 
blood, for the ‘continuous germ-plasma’ of 
the Caucasian race.’ ‘That Northerners and 
Europeans may choose their associates and 
such table company as they please is con- 
ceded. But “in the South the color Ime 
must be drawn firmly, unflinchingly—with- 
out deviation or interruption of any kind 
whatever.” There is a tu quoque for the 
Northern capitalists, who could hardly main- 
tain that their “ruling corporate powers” are 
even barely just “‘toward the poor and hum- 


ble, in the administration of the important 
101 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


industrial trusts which God has so wisely 
placed in their hands. They are giants, and 
it is in the nature of giants to press hard.” 
Comparatively, then, the South is sinless. 
On the merits of her own case the South 
“is entirely right in keeping open at all times, 
at all hazards, and at all sacrifices an impas- 
sable social chasm between black and white. 
This she must do in behalf of her blood, her 
essence, of the stock of her Caucasian race.” 
The alternative is mingling of the races. 
“It would make itself felt at first most 
strongly in the lower strata of the white 
population; but it would soon invade the 
middle and menace insidiously the very up- 
permost.... As arace, the Southern Caucasian 
would be irreversibly doomed.” Mr. Smith is so 
quotable that restraint is necessary in appro- 
priating his eloquence. ‘No other conceiv- 
able disaster,’ he says of race mixture, “that 
might befall the South could, for an instant, 
compare with such miscegenation within her 
borders. Flood and fire, fever and famine, 
and the sword—even ignorance, indolence, 
and carpet-baggery—she may endure and 
conquer while her blood remains pure; but 
once taint the wellspring of her life, and all 


is lost—even honor itself. It is this immediate 
102 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


jewel of her soul that the South watches 
with such a dragon eye, that she guards 
with more than vestal vigilance, with a 
circle of perpetual fire.’ As guardians of the 
South’s vestal fire, one is tempted to offer 
Mr. Smith volunteers from the three million 
to five million mulattoes of the United States. 
“It may not be that she is conscious of the 
immeasurable interests at stake or of the real 
grounds of her roused antagonism,” adds 
Mr. Smith, very truly; “but the instinct 
itself is none the less just and true and the 
natural bulwark of her life.’ Upon what is 
the justice of the South’s instinct, as formu- 
lated by Mr. Smith, based? Simply upon the 
proof “craniologically and by six thousand 
years of planet-wide experimentation”? that 
“the Negro is markedly inferior to the Cau- 
casian,’ and that “‘the commingling of inferior 
with superior must lower the higher.” Edu- 
cation and civilization are “‘weak and beggarly 
as over against the almightiness of heredity, 
the omniprepotence of the transmitted germ- 
plasma. Let this be amerced of its ancient 
rights, let it be shorn in some measure of its 
exceeding weight of ancestral glory, let it 
be soiled in its millennial purity and integrity, 


and nothing shall ever restore it; neither 
103 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


wealth, nor culture, nor science, nor art, nor 
morality, nor religion—not even Christianity 
itself. Here and there these may redeem 
some happy, spontaneous variation, some 
lucky freak of nature; but nothing more— 
they can never redeem the race. If this be 
not true, then history and biology are alike 
false; then Darwin and Spencer, Haeckel and 
Weismann, Mendel and Pearson, have lived 
and labored in vain.” What has any con- 
troversialist to offer against Mr. Smith who 
would bet the world’s history and science 
on the truth of his assertions, who asserts 
that a man “may sin against himself and 
others, and even against his God, but not 
against the germ-plasma of his kind’? For 
“if the best Negro in the land is the social 
equal of the best Caucasian, then it will be 
hard to prove that the lowest white is higher 
that the lowest black,’? and Darwin will have 
lived in vain. Lest it be thought that few 
will follow Mr. Smith, who, like Ibsen’s Brand, 
seeks “alles oder nichts’? among the inacces- 
sible pinnacles of absolutism, he assures the 
reader that he has “some acquaintance with 
some of the best elements of the Southern 
society, some of the best representatives in 


nearly all the walks of Southern life”; and 
104 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


those elements will never waver a_ hair’s- 
breadth from “uncompromising hostility to 
any and every form of social equality between 
the races.” 

Mr. Smith’s doctrine, then, is resolved into 
an. affirmation, for which he offers proofs, 
that the Negro is “inferior” biologically to 
such an extent that no education or civiliza- 
tion could bring him up to white men’s 
standards; that racial mixture would result 
in disastrous “mongrelization”’ of the “‘Cau- 
casian race,” and that an inevitable corollary 
of the abatement of rigid barriers against 
“social equality’ of the Negro and members 
of the “ Caucasian race”’ is this mongrelization. 
Therefore, let the Negro remain on the planta- 
tion and in “personal and occasional service 
. .. where his abilities may be most naturally 
and most profitably employed.” The Negro, 
like other “backward peoples,”’ has “‘neither 
part nor parcel in the future history of man.” 
Race transcends individual considerations. 
“There is a personal and even a social morality 
that may easily become racially immoral.” 
In the interests, therefore, of the purity of 
Caucasian germ-plasma, the Negro is to be 
denied the, for him, useless higher education, 


is to be used as a plantation laborer or ser- 
105 : 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


vant, and to be allowed, at the convenience 
of nature, to become extinct. Even mem- 
bership in labor unions will never be accorded 
the “negroid,” and the plans of Booker 
Washington and “his Northern multimill- 
ionaire admirers” for making skilled laborers 
of the Negro cannot succeed in solving the 
race problem. 

Another Southerner, of a different stamp, 
who has accepted the postulate of modern 
anthropology that all races of men are kin, 
and therefore hesitates to ally himself with 
Mr. Smith and the angels, contributes first- 
hand description of the Negro pertinent to 
this discussion. The Negro, Mr. W. D. 
Weatherford! finds, is lacking in self-control. 
“To him the future has little meaning.” 
This lack is explained by the exigencies of 
the tropical climate under whose influence 
the race had dwelt. Likewise the native 
of the tropics is led into a form of sexual 
indulgence “which seems nothing less than 
terrible.’ “The next weakness of Negro 
character which stands out prominently is 
superstition.” Fear of angry spirits, “‘of 
the power of the fetish,’ have to a degree 
“become so deeply ingrained in the nature 


1 Opus cit. 
106 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


of the Negro that the slaves and their de- 
scendants have never been able to shake 
themselves free from its terrible hold.” Hence 
the Negro’s conservatism. Cruelty to ani- 
mals and dependents is another character 
which Mr. Weatherford lists: “Some of 
the horrible practices of punishment in Africa 
would be unbelievable did not one have the 
thought of the Inquisition, St. Bartholomew, 
the French Revolution, ever staring him 
in the face.’ The portrait of the Negro is 
then still further elaborated with vanity and 
conceit, wordiness, and absence of the power 
of initiative. As against these shadows, Mr. 
Weatherford opposes the Negro’s fidelity. 
**In fact,’ he remarks, “if I must deal with a 
shiftless man, I believe I would take my 
chances on a trifling Negro rather than a 
triflmg white man. Not a few of the man- 
agers and owners of large plantations have 
expressed to me this same preference.” That 
fidelity which was supposed to be char- 
acteristic of the old-time Negro survives 
in the “new Negro.” “They may lie or 
steal in petty ways,” says Mr. Weatherford, 
“but even the poorest type of Negro rarely 
betrays a specific trust.” Add to these 


traits gratitude, generosity, the absence of 
107 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


malice or a revengeful spirit, kindliness, a 
sense of humor, religious sense, love of music, 
“souls responsive to the truest of musical 
rhythm.” “What if the race is not the 
most brilhiantly intellectual? What if they 
are lacking in self-mastery? What if there 
is often a lack of industry and thrift?—here 
is a catalogue of race traits enough to make 
any race happy, virtuous, useful, and even 
great.” Thus two Southerners. 

It will perhaps be advantageous to list the 
characteristics of the Negro as they are given 
by Messrs. Smith and Weatherford, and to 
add to them such as will be recognized as 
passing current. The list might read some- 


what as follows: 


Against 


1, “Inferior” biologically as 
indicated by abnormal 
length of arm, progna- 
thism, brain weight and 
structure, eye coloration, 
flat nose, protruding lips, 
large zygmotic arches, 
size of face, thick cranium. 
weak lower limbs, skin col- 
or, “‘woolly” hair, thick 
epidermis, “‘rancid’”’ skin 
odor, cranial sutures. 

2. “‘Inferior”’ culturally. 


108 


I Or P 09 OO = 


For 


. Faithful. 

. Kindly. 

. Generous. 

. Musical (rhythmically). 

. Grateful. 

. Religious. 

. Lacking in malice and venge- 


fulness. 


. Physically stronger than 


white. 


. More resistant to certain 


diseases and even immune 
to some. 


3. Intellectual 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


Against 

development 
stops at puberty. 

4, Immoral (sexually). 

5. Uncontrolled as to appetites 
and subject to “primal 
emotions” such as fear, 
anger, jealousy, self-ex- 
altation, self-depreciation, 
sorrow. 

6. Superstitious. 

7. Cruel. 

8. Conceited and wordy. 

9. Shiftless and lazy. 

. Lacking in initiative. 

. Deficient in reasoning power 
and the “higher” intel- 
lectual processes. 

. Criminal. 


For 


10. Adaptable to climate and 
culture. 
11. Persistent, racially. 


There are in addition certain qualities 
commonly ascribed to the person of color 
possessing some admixture of white blood. 


Thus: 

Against 

1. “Degenerate” and “inferior 
hybrids.” 

2. Physically inferior, succumbs 
easily to disease: lung ca- 
pacity inferior, respira- 
tion rate unfavorable, 
never passes sixty years, 

_ “cachetic.” 

3. Listless. 

4. Criminal. 

5. Short-lived. 

6. Fails to propagate. 

7..°*Scrofulous, consumptive.” 


For 
1. Abler than the Negro of pure 
blood. 
2. More intelligent than the 
Negro. 
3. Sturdier physically than the 
Negro. 


4. Furnishes leaders of the race. 


109 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


It will be noticed that many of the char- 
acters attributed to Negroes and to colored 
men with white ancestry are contradictory. 
The whole field of science, from biology and 
chemistry to anthropology and archeology, 
is involved in the discussion, to which the 
explorer, the historian, the psychologist, the 
violently partizan amateur contribute their 
beclouding pronouncements. The tendency 
among men of science is to narrow the dis- 
cussion from such all-inclusive terms as “‘racial 
inferiority’? to measurement of specific apti- 
tudes and characters. The characters of 
race and culture are so many and so com- 
plex that it Is assuming omniscience to 
pretend to sum up all available knowledge, 
and, having weighed and balanced, to give 
final judgment for or against a race. Modern 
anthropology takes the position, with respect 
to the Negro, as with other races, that no 
direct connection between physical characters 
and abilities or aptitudes has yet been estab- 
lished. Thus even the possession of large 
or small brains does not postulate genius or 
stupidity. The measurement of ability by 
intelligence tests is still in its infancy, a 
development of, at most, the last twenty 


years. Nearly if not all of the scientific 
110 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


experiment such as the measurement of intel- 
ligence of school-children, of Negro and white 
races, 1s subject to criticism of method, in 
that it has not been possible to isolate racial 
characters from influence of social environ- 
ment. 

In an account of one experimental study 
of white and colored children of Richmond 
and Newport News, Virginia, the author, 
George Oscar Furguson,! ably summarizes 
the conflicting views entertained by scientists 
the world over. “One would not be far 
wrong,’ he remarks, “‘in saying that all of 
the experimental work done on the psychology 
of the Negro prior to 1900 is of practically 
negative value.” And yet, on the basis of 
observations, often partial, more often un- 
critical and inaccurate, even scientists have 
dogmatized. Le Bon divided the races of 
man into four classes, of which the “‘superior,”’ 
as contrasted with “primitive,” “inferior,”’ 
and “average,” consisted in the “‘Indo-Euro- 
peans.” G. Stanley Hall has repeated the 
assertion that the Negro’s development is 
partially arrested at puberty. Bean, in his 
studies at Baltimore, came to the conclusion 

1The Psychology of the Negro: An Experimental Study, Archives 


of Psychology, April, 1916. 
111 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


that not only the anterior association center of 
the Negro’s brain, but the whole frontal lobe, 
was smaller than the white man’s, whereas 
Mall three years later concluded that “with 
the present crude methods the statement 
that the Negro brain approaches the fetal 
or simian brain more than does the white is 
entirely unwarranted.” Mall, according to 
Furguson, “‘reviews the previous work done in 
this field, and comes to the final conclusion 
that there is no valid evidence to show 
significant brain differences from the point of 
view of race, sex, or genius.” From the 
point of view of the psychologist, Woodworth 
in 1910, reviewing the work of himself, 
Rivers, Bruner, Ranke, McDougall, and 
Myers, said of the status of race psychology: 
“One thing the psychologist can assert with 
no fear of error. Starting from the various 
mental processes which are recognized in his 
text-books, he can assert that each of these 
processes is within the capabilities of every 
group of mankind. . . . Statements to the 
contrary, denying to the savage powers of 
reasoning, or abstraction, or inhibition, or 
foresight, can be dismissed at once. If the 
savage differs in these respects from the 


civilized man, the difference is one of degree, 
112 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


and consistent with overlapping of savage 
and civilized individuals.”’ 

It is therefore hazardous, to say the least, 
in the present state of information about 
race and race characters, to assert that any 
race is inferior and “incapable” of any known 
state of culture. Furguson’s tests led him to 
conclude that “the average performance of 
the colored population of this country in 
such intellectual work as that represented 
by the tests of higher capacity appears to 
be only about three-fourths as efficient as 
the performance of whites of the same amount 
of training,’ and he indicated his belief that 
the difference is probably wider than the 
tests show. On the other hand, his tests 
did not show “the relative ability of colored 
and white persons in the intelligent handling 
of concrete materials.” But just what the 
tests do show is open to question. 

“It is always difficult to state just what 
mental function is experimented upon by a 
given test,” says Furguson. “The various 
traits so overlap and are so dependent upon 
one another in their action that no one trait 
can be completely isolated.”” Meanwhile, it 
can be said without fear of contradiction that 


there is no authentic corroboration for the 
8 113 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


following statements: (1) that the mulatto 
is less hardy than the “pure” Negro; (2) 
that any difference in brain structure between 
white and Negro has been indubitably estab- 
lished; (3) that the Negro’s mental growth 
“comes to a comparative standstill at adoles- 
cence”; (4) that the “relative merits” of 
pure Negroes and mulattoes have been defi- 
nitely made known. Although most of the 
writers who “have dealt with the problem 
of the relative mental ability of the white 
and the Negro take the view that the Negro 
is inferior,” yet, says Furguson later, “it is . 
probably true that there are more people 
who believe in racial mental equality than the 
reviews would indicate; equality is taken for 
granted, as in the greater part of our school 
system and in our political life. [?] . .. It 
may be said that the main conclusion one 
may draw from a study of the literature 
bearing upon the mental side of our race 
question is that we have taken a step toward 
its solution, but that the problem is still a 
problem.” 

Despite the doubts and the lacunze which 
modern science must confess to in its data on 
race, popular discussion, never especially 


responsive to subtleties, always seizes on 
114 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


extreme statements and makes general prin- 
ciples of them of universal application. In 
this feast of generalities, contradiction, en- 
throned as a sort of piratical goddess, sits 
and smiles evilly on folly. Thus the Negro, 
branded as lazy and shiftless, was credited 
by Shaler! with an ability to toil, “such, 
indeed, as has never elsewhere appeared in a 
primitive people.’ This same scientist, who 
asserts that in the Negro “the state-building 
capacities are lacking,” is flatly contradicted 
by the observations of anthropologists, sum- 
marized by Lowie to the effect that the 
Negroes of Africa “‘are conspicuous for their 
ability to form large and powerful political 
states. ... If we contrast Negro culture 
on the average not with the highest products 
of Dutch, Danish, or Swiss culture,” he con- 
tinues, ““but with the status of the illiterate 
peasant communities in not a few regions 
of Europe, the difference will hardly be so 
great as to suggest any far-reaching hereditary 
causes.” 2? Furthermore, Mr. Lowie suggests, 
the determination of racial potentialities by 
the psychologist does not solve the problems 


1 Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, The Neighbor. p. 156. 
2 Robert H. Lowie, Culture and Ethnology, 1917. New York: 
Douglas C. McMuririe. 
115 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


of culture: “‘Even if an ultimate investiga- 
tion should definitely fix the cultural limits 
to which a given race is hereditarily subject, 
such information could not solve the far more 
specific problem why the same people a few 
hundred years earlier were a horde of bar- 
barians and a few hundred years later formed 
a highly civilized community.” When the 
investigator has carefully accumulated and 
collated more facts than are available at 
present, his conclusions may become useful 
for American society. Meanwhile it is the 
sort of argumentation that appears in Mr. 
Smith’s book which, imperceptibly almost, 
influences discussion of the Negro and of 
race relations even in the North. One may 
smile at any one’s presuming to know what 
relative positions God has ordained for Negro 
and white man. But given a_ conviction 
on the part of one-third or one-half of the 
white group of a nation that a colored group 
is inferior; bolster that conviction with con- 
stant reference in the press to colored people 
as criminals; treat the Negro in public dis- 
cussion as an amalgam of joke and calamity— 
and no public will be disposed to analyze 
the social conditions which tend to make the 


Negro with whom they may come in contact 
116 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


what he is. Much of what might be called 
the pro-Negro side of race discussion has 
been in the nature of negative evidence. 
For example, it is trumpeted far and wide 
that the Negro is racially and by nature a 
criminal. Statistics of crime are adduced 
in proof. Then the social scientist investi- 
gates and discovers that a far larger per cent. 
of Negro mothers than white must leave their 
families during the daytime in order to earn 
money, thus contributing to juvenile delin- 
quency. He discovers that in Southern courts 
Negroes are convicted on evidence on which 
any white man would go scot-free. He finds 
that Negro vice, of which there is so much 
talk, is much more closely involved with the 
*‘superior race”’ than the reports of the news- 
papers would indicate. “‘The cry in the 
Southern newspapers against Negro dives,” 
remarks Professor Hart, “‘generally ignores 
the fact that many of them are carried on 
by white people, and others are partially 
supported by white custom.” ! As contrasted 
with the looseness and immorality commonly 
ascribed to the Negro, there are such observa- 
tions as those of Junod? of the elaborate 
1 Albert Bushnell Hart, The Southern South. 


* Henri A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe. 
117 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


ceremonial and religious restrictions upon 
sexual indulgence which guide natives of 
Africa. But in the conditions of modern 
news service, misstatements always find their 
way to a larger public than do corrections, 
partly because they are more frequent and 
more emphatic, partly because they are 
considered to possess more “‘news value”’ 
and are therefore boldly displayed, partly 
because such misstatements reinforce popular 
preconceptions. To such an extent is public 
sentiment formed by obvious fabrications 
that even those men who would voice the 
Negro’s grievances must bow to prejudice. 

In November, 1919, for example, The 
Arkansas Gazette published a transcript of 
an address by the president of Hendrix Col- 
lege. The speaker, obviously animated by 
the disastrous riots which had occurred in 
Philips County in October, 1919, spoke of 
the necessity for examining the causes of 
discontent among Negroes, of establishing 
understanding and co-operation between lead- 
ers of both races. But he felt obliged to 
“sweeten”? his remarks to Southern white 
men by saying that “the Negro is a child 
race”’ and is “weak, docile, and is easily con- 


trolled.” He conceded that the Negro ‘‘has 
118 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


much of humanity in him—is good-natured 
and quick to forget wrongs.” The phrasing 
is the more significant in that it came from a 
man who realized the dangers created by the 
prevailing injustice to the Negro, and was 
eager to make his hearers realize those dangers 
also. 

Even cultivated Americans are too fre- 
quently unaware of the incertitudes of the 
scientist on questions involving race. But 
they are fed with certitudes, from the Southern 
press, of the “we know the nigger”’ type. 
Mr. Lowie has shown “how many factors 
have to be weighed in arriving at a fair 
estimate of racial capabilities, factors which 
are naively ignored in most popular discus- 
sions of the subject. We can, farther, say 
positively that whatever differences may exist 
have been grossly exaggerated.” The process 
of gross exaggeration is a norm of public dis- 
cussion of race relations. The mere fact 
of the mention of race in connection with 
crime, the repetition in head-lines of such 
epithets as “Negro Fiend,” “Negro Mur- 
derer,” the tacit assumptions underlying 
which have made it possible to associate 
race with fortuitous criminal acts, are a 


measure of the extent to which the South’s 
119 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


color psychosis is shared by and colors the 
thought of the nation. Crime, except in so 
far as it is analyzed into the conditions which 
have produced it, consists of a series of 
symptoms. To talk of any civilization in 
terms of the crimes committed by members 
of its society is to talk about a living organism 
in terms of the symptoms of its disease. From 
no other point of view is severer criticism 
of the American press possible than from that 
of a citizen who desires less embittered sus- 
picion and more understanding of Negro 
and white man for one another. Before the 
era of the World War the impress of such 
conformity of public opinion as prevails in 
the South was foreign to the rest of the 
nation. But even if there is not, as there 
was in Washington, in Omaha, and in Chicago, 
before the riots there, a deliberate press 
campaign to debase the Negro, continual and 
casual reporting of Negro criminality will 
have the same effect. 

Washington has long been a border on 
which Northern and Southern attitudes tow- 
ard race have met and been pressed in 
conflict. Technically the Northern attitude 
has prevailed, even under Democratic admin- 


istrations; attempts to enact street-car segre- 
120 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


gation and other Jim Crow ordinances for the 
District of Columbia failed. One such meas- 
ure was introduced at the very time of the 
riots. During the riots the Southern attitude 
prevailed. White men did try to show the 
Negro “his place.” The conflict between 
Northern and Southern points of view, re- 
peatedly checked as Jim Crow bills applying 
to the District of Columbia were defeated, 
then went over to the newspapers. The 
statistics of the Washington chief of police 
had little weight against the reports of: a 
crime wave and flaring head-lines announcing 
that another Negro brute had “attacked” 
a white woman. The condition of hysteria 
which the newspapers effected was, presum- 
ably, local to Washington. It was obvious 
a press campaign was under way. Anti- 
prohibitionists were triumphantly pointing 
to the “wave of crime” in support of their 
contentions. The commissioners of the Dis- 
trict of Columbia and the chief of police were 
involved in charges of poor administration. 
To any reader of newspapers to whom printed 
paper is not apocalyptic, ulterior motive was 
written over the face of the “crime wave” 
in which the newspapers were bathed. A 


critical attitude might have been expected of 
121 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


news-distributing agencies and of correspond- 
ents of powerful newspapers—that is, on the 
part of any one who had had no experience 
with news distribution. But the most inflam- 
mable misstatements were absorbed whole 
and were sent broadcast throughout the 
country. What was by admission of a com- 
missioner of the District of Columbia a series 
of attacks by white men upon Negroes was 
distorted by a New York Times head-line into 
‘*“Negroes again riot in Washington, killing 
white men,’ by The New York World to 
“Three are killed as blacks renew riots in 
capital,” and by The New York Evening Tele- 
gram to “United States cavalry unable to 
quell Negroes.”’ The white mobs were beaten 
back by Negroes themselves. But white 
mobbism won its victory in the newspapers. 
To a Northern public, not consciously affected 
by the rigidity of Southern sentiment about 
race, there came, nevertheless, news reports 
of a sort which that Southern sentiment 
would have exacted. Similar conditions pre- 
vailed with regard to the riots in Arkansas, 
in Knoxville, in Omaha. At the Southern 
end of the telegraph wires which feed the 
country with its news are frequently men 


either attuned to conformity on race problems 
122 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


or forced into it in virtue of the necessity for 
continuing to live and to earn in a white 
Southern environment. 

To what an extent the South’s color 
psychosis afflicts the nation few Americans 
realize unless their attention is called to such 
an exceptional performance as that of The 
Chicago Daily News in directing Mr. Carl 
Sandburg to report on race relations there. 
His investigations of the effects of the mi- 
eration, real-estate ventures, industrial and 
labor conditions, the reflex of each lynching 
on the North, crime and politics, which The 
Daily News made available in a series of 
articles! should have commended itself as a 
matter of journalistic procedure to every 
Chicago editor at least. “Publication of the 
articles had proceeded two weeks,” says Mr. 
Sandburg, “and they were approaching the 
point where a program of constructive recom- 
mendations would have been proper, when 
the riots broke and as usual nearly everybody 
was more interested in the war than how it 
got loose.” But it was not until the war 
“got loose” that most editors took an effec- 
tive interest in race relations in Chicago, and 

‘ Republished as The Chicago Race Riots, 1919. Harcourt, Brace, 


& Howe, New York. 
123 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


then in a number of cases they did so only 
to pour oil on the flames. The condition 
Mr. Sandburg describes is a characteristic 
one. No one is more interested in war, 
apparently, than American newspaper edi- 
tors, and no one 1s less interested than they 
in how it gets loose. The mixture of cynical 
indifference, ignorance, and falsity with which 
race relations are treated daily, extraneous 
circumstances like the crime of a degenerate 
are fastened to race and the connection 
riveted upon the public mind, is the most 
sweeping commentary possible on the Ameri- 
can approach to what is often called the 
nation’s tragedy. 

For the purpose of furnishing Americans 
with accurate information on race and race 
relations, modern science might almost as 
well not exist. “‘ Blind devotion to the dogma 
of the natural inferiority of the black race” 
has mdeed, as Mr. George Elliot Howard 
says, “cost the white race dearly. . . . In 
fact, for nearly a hundred years the intel- 
lectual energy of the South has been absorbed 
in the defense or protection of its cherished 
race dogma.” ! The process of transferring 


1 “The Social Cost of Southern Race Prejudice,” American Journal 
of Sociology, March, 1917. 


124 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


this fruitless and uninformed conflict to the 
entire United States, goes relentlessly on. 
“That lust is a racial ‘instinct’ in the Negro,” 
continues Mr. Howard, “uncontrollable and 
ineradicable—is the sinister lesson taught 
by the novels, the dramas, the essays, the 
newspapers, and the political demagogues 
that have shaped public opinion in the South. 
The most suggestive epithets are devised to 
kindle the passions of the mob.” If the 
press is an effective means of creating hatred 
and distrust, the motion picture has been 
shown no less effective. Dominated by fear, 
with minds closed to one avenue at least, 
divided against itself, sterilized and made to 
that degree inflexible in thought, the white 
South is yet an integral part of the United 
States, tied to popular emotion by every 
means of communication and _ intercourse. 
It seems almost exaggeration to say that 
colored people know more about the facts 
of race and of race relations than do white 
Americans. Yet, in many instances that is 
true. For where the white press shirks re- 
sponsibility for presenting the analyses and 
then the obvious facts which would make 
race inequities glaringly clear, the colored 


press, sometimes with bitterness, takes up 
125 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


the burden. A white American desirous 
of a critical insight into the society in 
which he flatters himself he lives could 
not do better than read carefully a num- 
ber of race-consclous newspapers pub- 
lished for and by Negroes of the United 
States. 

Upon science, then, upon the carefully 
ascertained information essential to any com- 
munity’s progress, the South’s color psychosis 
lays obstructions and fetters. Such informa- 
tion, in the state of the Southern public mind 
and press, cannot penetrate the Southern 
states. On the other hand, current misin- 
formation and dogma, carried in every vehicle 
for creating and forming public opinion, 
emanates from the South to the rest of the 
country. Misinformation is the product not 
necessarily of the absence of means to truth, 
but of a closed mind. Upon the nation’s 
life the closed mind of the South in matters 
pertaining to race has had a poisonous effect. 
The distinction of North and South is neither 
made nor Is it perpetuated north of Mason 
and Dixon’s line. It has been made by the 
South in virtue of a Kultur which a thousand 
semi-literate Treitschkes have been _per- 


mitted to affirm from their editorial chairs, 
126 


ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH 


basing their ascendancy and that of their 
kind upon malignant and ignorant denun- 
ciation of the black man; upon _ hostility 
to the life of the modern world—scientific 
investigation. 


V 
CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


“ AGITATION of the Negro question 

became bad form in the North,” wrote 
Dr. Charles A. Beard, “‘except for quadrennial 
political purposes.” 1! It is still bad form, 
despite the occasional resolutions offered in 
the Senate, to investigate over-representation 
of the South. The Negro, elevated to the 
vote and to political equality with whites, 
was dropped by the more “practical” Re- 
publicans after Reconstruction days, when 
the “‘cash nexus” of North with the South 
had been once more formed. Since the 
earliest days of American political life it has 
been bad form to agitate the Negro question. 
First, it pierced the glamour of religious and 
political idealism that was made to surround 
the nation’s beginnings. The integrity of 
American Revolution itself was qualified. 
“In Jefferson’s original draft of the great 


1Charles A. Beard, Contemporary American History, p. 22. 
128 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


Declaration there was a paragraph indicting 
the king for having kept open the African 
slave trade against colonial efforts to close 
it,’ says Phillips, “‘and for having violated 
thereby the ‘most sacred rights of life and 
liberty of a distant people, who never offended 
him, captivating them into slavery in anoth- 
er hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in 
their transportation thither.’ This passage, 
according to Jefferson’s account, ‘was struck 
out in compliance to South Carolina and 
Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain 
the importation of slaves and who on the 
contrary still wished to continue it. Our 
Northern brethren also I believe,’ Jefferson 
continued, ‘felt a little tender under these cen- 
sures, for though their people have very few 
slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty 
considerable carriers of them to others.’” ! 
Before ever the Negro himself began to look 
about the American political scene and to 
criticize principles and professions the spirit 
was abroad among white Americans. But 
for the most part the anomaly was resolved 
by intensity rather of idealism than of 
criticism. 

The more vehemently Americanism, free- 


1 Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, opus cit., p. 116. 
9 129 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


dom, and equality are affirmed publicly the 
less pressing does it seem to examine just 
what they practically and individually imply. 
There is room for a study of American idealism 
as it is rooted in race relations. If the Re- 
publican party has been dominated at various 
times by practical men who preferred a mixt- 
ure of ethical principles and industrial lavssez- 
faire, the Democratic party has been utterly 
tethered. Democrats might rejoice in Andrew 
Jacksonism, but liberalism in a modern sense 
was denied them; they could only chafe 
at the division with which even Woodrow 
Wilson’s reliance on the North for sentiment 
and on the South for votes menaced their 
party. The Civil War, which is commonly 
believed to have established the freedom 
of the American Negro, was, in this sense, 
merely another symbol of the struggle and 
division which was endemic before 1861, and 
still continues. 

It might be said that in the Civil War 
the armies of Lee had finally surrendered 
to Grant, but that the eventual victory had 
rested with the Confederacy, whose cast of 
mind, whose over-representation in the House 
of Representatives, have been almost unchal- 


Jenged in the nation. “‘Under the original Con- 
130 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


stitution of the United States,” says Doctor 
Beard, “only three-fifths of the slaves were 
counted in apportioning representatives among 
the states; under the Fourteenth Amendment 
all the Negroes were counted, thus enlarging 
the representation of the Southern states.” 
The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitu- 
tion represented one of the idealist gestures 
which, at the time of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, Americans hesitated to make. 

With the American Negro free, a voter, 
and seemingly given a fair field of opportunity, 
race relations enjoyed a period of disregard. 
You cannot really confer freedom upon people 
who do not demand and make their own 
freedom, it was assumed, and the “real 
Negro question” was said to be: 

“Can the race demonstrate that capacity 
for sustained economic activity and permanent 
organization which has lifted the white masses 
from serfdom?” This is to make the “‘race 
question”’ again too preponderantly one of 
racial aptitude. Only by eventual alliance 
of the Negro with white labor, if that should 
come about, will the imadequacy of the 
statement be demonstrated. 

Participation of the United States in the 
World War changed the symbol. But the 


131 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


thing symbolized, the struggle within the 
nation, remained. It was an external enemy 
which the American armies went out to 
contend with. But the essential struggle 
of the war will be found to have been within 
the United States. The struggle consisted 
again in an effort to make American idealism 
ring true. Often to the Negro, the focus of 
this struggle, the American point of view 
was cynically represented. One group of 
Negro soldiers were frankly and _ brutally 
informed that they were going to fight for 
democracy in Europe. For every group who 
met the fact in a frank statement, dozens 
found reason to come to that conclusion. 
What the World War seems again to have 
emphasized and crystallized is the futility 
of applying the phrases of political idealism 
to a set of problems which, like those allied 
with race relations, demand varied and re- 
sourceful manipulation. The conflict over 
race relations is not set at rest by the unques- 
tioned prosperity and opportunity which the 
World War brought to many colored Ameri- 
cans. In a sense, that opportunity has only 
intensified the struggle. Probably, since the 
United States entered the war, more Ameri- 


cans could be found who are apprehensive 
132 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


of the future of race relations than there 
were before. Many colored citizens were sat- 
isfied with half-Americanism until hundred- 
per-cent. Americanism was blared and dinned 
into their ears. Under the circumstances 
it was expecting too much to believe they 
would cultivate deafness. Of the prosperity 
of families brought North and of the educa- 
tion of desire which comes with means to 
gratify wants, much may be ascribed to the 
war. But on the other hand, many Negroes 
say that their condition is, if anything, 
worse since the war. And progress which 
depends upon a shortage of labor and war 
wages is subject to fluctuation. Under the 
suggestive title, “Why Southern Negroes 
Don’t Go South,” Mr. T. Arnold Hull! of 
the Chicago Urban League summarized cer- 
tain of the World War’s effects upon Negroes. 
Queries sent to hundreds of Negroes living 
in the South elicited replies of this nature: 

“I fail to see any improvement”; “There 
_ has been no change for the better’’; “‘ Why, 
conditions are worse than ever.” 

One man wrote to The Chicago Defender 
saying: ““After twenty years of seeing my 
people lynched for any offense from spitting 


1 The Survey, November 29, 1919. 
133 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


on the sidewalk to stealing a mule, I made 
up my mind that I would turn the prow 
of my ship toward the part of the country 
where the people at least made a pretense 
at being civilized. You may say for me, 
through your paper, that when a man’s home 
is sacred; when he can protect the virtue 
of his wife and daughter against the brutal 
lust of his alleged superiors; when he can 
sleep at night without the fear of being 
visited by the Ku-Klux Klan because of 
refusal to take off his hat while passing an 
overseer—then [ will be willing to return 
to Mississippi.” 

Both in the North and in the South each 
increase in prosperity of the Negro made 
feeling about race relations correspondingly 
tense. In the South, as always, the ten- 
sity manifested itself politically. Putting the 
Negro into the army was fiercely resented 
because it made the colored soldier an “equal” 
of the white. The bitterness had its reflex 
in rural districts, where white determination 
stiffened that that equality should not extend 
beyond the army. One consequence of this 
tension was a recrudescence of the Ku-Klux 
Klan, with aggressive announcements in the 


newspapers calling upon white men, in the 
134 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


familiar language of the night riders of old, 
to gather for the defense of womanhood and 
the Southland. But colored Americans were 
being taught that fighting was not a racial 
prerogative, even if voting was. Their in- 
struction was interrupted at times by a 
propaganda asserting that colored troops 
had failed and that France had requested 
their return to the United States because 
of sexual crimes. But the Secretary of War 
disposed of the propaganda by a vigorous 
statement proving its falsity; and Brigadier- 
General Sherburne on numerous occasions 
publicly praised the courage, the endurance, 
and the soldierly qualities the colored troops 
in his command had displayed under the most 
difficult circumstances. The propaganda, 
therefore, which became accepted gossip 
among many white men of the United States 
army, did not affect the Negro’s sense of his 
own fitness except to intensify his feeling of 
the injustice of the treatment given him. A 
significant item of his education in interna- 
tional affairs was the cordiality of French 
people and its effect among white people 
in his own land. Of the disabilities that were 
imposed upon the Negro in the army the list 


is a long and cruel one. How color prejudice 
135 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


worked against the success of the nation’s 
arms was indicated by Major J. E. Spingarn 
of the American Expeditionary Forces, who 
publicly accused Southern officers with trea- 
son, in that they preferred white ascendancy 
in the army to the measures necessary for 
efficiency and for victory. In a number of 
Southern states the quota of colored men 
drafted exceeded the white. Thus from Mis- 
sissippi 24,066 colored men, as against 21,182 
white, joined the colors; in South Carolina 
25,789 colored men, as against 19,909 white; 
in Florida 12,904 colored and 12,769 white; 
and in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana the 
quotas of colored and white men were very 
nearly equal. Despite the objections which 
the white South made to the enlistment and 
conscription of colored men, every means 
was used to exempt as few as possible from 
military service. In many sections, says a 
former special assistant to the Secretary of 
War, the Negro “contributed many more 
than his quota; and, in defiance of both the 
spirit and letter of the draft law, Negro 
married men with large families to support 
were impressed into military service regard- 
less of their protests and appeals, and their 


wives, children, and dependents suffered un- 
136 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


called-for hardships. Local draft boards, in 
almost every instance composed exclusively 
of white men, were in a position, if so inclined, 
to show favoritism to men of their own race; 
the official figures of the draft reveal the fact 
that in many sections of the country exemp- 
tions were granted white men who were single 
with practically no dependents, while Negroes 
were conscripted into service regardless of 
their urgent need in agriculture or the essential 
industries, and without considering their fam- 
ily relations or obligations.” ! 

The effect of excluding colored men from 
draft boards was made sufficiently clear in the 
first report of the Provost-Marshal-General, 
which showed that of every 100 colored citi- 
zens called, 36 were certified for service, and of 
every 100 white men called, only 25 were 
certified. Furthermore, of the registrants 
placed in Class I of the draft, colored men 
contributed 51.65 per cent. of their registrants 
as against 32.53 per cent. of the white. The 
Negro, Mr. Scott continues, “‘had practically 
no representation upon the draft boards 
which passed upon his appeals—an arrange- 
ment which was wholly at variance with the 
theory of American institutions.” 


1 Emmett J. Scott, The American Negro in the World War, p. 428. 
137 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


The record of the injustice and brutality 
of which the Negro was made a victim in the 
United States army is too long even for 
summary treatment. Commanded as colored 
soldiers were, for the most part, by white 
officers and non-commissioned officers, mem- 
bers of their own race being with few excep- 
tions denied promotion, they were domineered 
over and insulted. Every sort of hardship 
was visited upon even the most capable of 
the comparatively few colored officers com- 
missioned. ‘The ranking colored officer of 
the United States army, who was _ subse- 
quently sent as military attaché to Liberia, 
spoke of the unremitting efforts that were 
made to discredit and humiliate the black 
officer before the world and before his men. 
In every way possible colored soldiers and 
their officers in France were discriminated 
against. Thus, General Erwin, commanding 
the 92d Division, is reported to have issued 
“Order No. 40,” that Negroes should not 
speak to Frenchwomen. “Carrying out this 
order,” says Mr. Scott, “the military police 
overseas undertook to arrest Negroes found 
talking to Frenchwomen, while the white pri- 
vates and officers were not molested. This 


led to a serious misunderstanding between 
138 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


the French and the Americans and to a 
number of brawls in which the white and 
black soldiers participated.” 

Propaganda by white Americans to dis- 
credit their colored brothers in arms even 
went to the length of a secret communication 
to French officers and civilians, issued from 
General Pershing’s headquarters, warning 
them against treating “the Negro with famil- 
larity and indulgence,” the French public 
not having become aware of the “‘menace 
of degeneracy”? which had created an impas- 
sable “gulf” in the United States between 
races. American opinion is represented as the 
being unanimous in regarding the black man 
“as an inferior being with whom relations 
of business or service only are possible.” 
The Negro’s vices, this astonishing document 
says, ‘‘are a constant menace to the American, 
who has to repress them sternly.” Warning 
is given against “‘the rise of any pronounced 
degree of intimacy between French officers 
and black officers. ... We must not eat 
with them, must not shake hands or seek 
to talk or meet with them outside of the 
requirements of military service.” 

Also, French people “must not commend 


too highly the black American troops, particu- 
139 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


larly in the presence of white Americans.” 
“French officers and French civilians,” says 
Mr. Scott, “as a rule, could not understand 
why the black soldiers should not be treated 
identically as white American soldiers; when 
French officers were alone with Negro officers 
the latter were treated with the utmost 
friendliness and consideration, and it was only 
when in the presence of American officers 
that they reluctantly observed the official 
order, inspired by race prejudice.’ Much 
matter has been published showing that white 
commanders made repeated and _ insistent 
requests that colored officers be removed. 
Colored soldiers had, like colored laborers 
in civil life, to do the hardest and most dis- 
agreeable work of the army. They were 
assigned to coaling and stevedore duty fre- 
quently under imputation of lack of courage 
or ability. One Negro officer, at the close 
of a letter setting forth the difficulties he 
had had to endure, remarked: 

“I am beginning to wonder whether it will 
ever be possible for me to see an American 
white without wishing that he were in his 
Satanic Majesty’s private domain. I must 
pray long and earnestly that hatred of my 


fellow-man be removed from my heart and 
140 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


that I can truthfully lay claim to being a 
Christian.” 

On the civilian Negro, as well as on the 
colored soldier, the requirements of war were 
frequently made to bear with exceptional 
rigor. A survey of compulsory work laws 
and their enforcement led the investigator 
to conclude that ““many employers of Negro 
labor in the South utilized the national 
emergency to force Negroes into a condition 
which bordered virtually on peonage... . 
No one,” he adds, “‘can tell how far the sys- 
tem extended, as most of the offenses occurred 
in the smaller towns and communities where 
Negroes dare not reveal the true conditions for 
fear of punishment, a fear which is well founded, | 
as the lynching record of 1918 will testify.” ! 
It would be idle to pretend that disillusion 
and bitterness did not follow in the wake 
of the military and civilian discrimination 
against the Negro. For the most part it was 
expressed in migration of colored people 
from the South. Unquestionably it found 
vent in the violence and the riots that made 
melodrama of race relations during the war, 
but especially in 1919. Never before to 
such an extent had the Negro fought back to 


1 Walter F. White, The New Republic, March 1, 1919. 
141 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


repel white mobs as in Washington and 
Chicago. Hounded in the South, denied 
protection, whether from labor unions or 
from city officers in the North, the Negro 
armed himself. A condition for which white 
Americans were primarily to blame was 
laid at the door of the Negro. The most 
fantastic stories emanated from Washington, 
especially from Representative Byrnes of 
South Carolina and other Southern members 
of the House, later from the Department of 
Justice. 

The Lusk Investigating Committee of New 
York State made the alarming discovery that 
Socialists were actually trying to “convert” 
colored men to Socialism. Editorial comment 
of the less windy sort was represented by 
The Springfield Republican, which, adverting 
to the Lusk Committee’s discovery of the 
plan to “‘convert” Negroes, remarked: “If 
there was anything unlawful in such a pro- 
gram—assuming of course that no violence 
was to be preached—we fail to see it. But 
the Lusk Committee ‘expressed amazement,’ 
and Senator Lusk said that he regarded this 
evidence of a detailed plan for the spreading 
of ‘Bolshevist’ propaganda among Negroes 


in the South as the greatest menace the 
142 


. CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


evidence before the committee so far had 
disclosed. The grim irony of the situation is 
that the very first point in the plan was that 
‘all acts of injustice to the Negro’ were to be 
condemned. Perhaps that is revolutionary! 
God save America if it is!” 

“Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt” 
announced The New York Times in July, 1919, 
and a few days later, “‘Radicals Inciting 
Negro to Violence.” ‘“‘Negroes of World 
Prey to Agitators,” said a Times scarehead 
in August, and The New York Tribune an- 
nounced a few days later a “Plot to Stir 
Race Antagonism in United States Charged 
to Soviets.’ Officers of the Department of 
Justice were quoted as saying that “‘charges 
of an organized propaganda made in the 
House yesterday by Representative Byrnes, 
Democrat, of South Carolina, seemed to be 
well founded. . . . Agents of the Department 
of Justice are investigating. Facts thus far 
developed lead officials to believe that I. W. W. 
and Soviet influences were at the bottom 
of the recent race riots in Washington and 
Chicago.” “‘United States Reveals Sedition 
among Negro Masses,” said the caption of 
an article widely distributed over the country 


under the signature of David Lawrence, and 
143 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA: 


‘Radicalism among Negroes Growing, United 
States Record Shows,’ announced The New 
York World in November of 1919. Despite 
the hysterical newsmongering imspired by 
Southern representatives, to which the Depart- 
ment of Justice was made a party, no connec- 
tion between Russian or any other Soviet and 
Negro citizens of the United States was ever 
publicly established. Not enough evidence 
was accumulated by the loquacious investiga- 
tors of the Department of Justice and their 
garrulous chief to procure the indictment 
of a single Negro of importance in the United 
States. They did succeed, however, in spread- 
ing a polsonous mass of misinformation and 
distrust. So persistent was the campaign 
of calumny that a group of colored editors 
were finally moved to appeal to the Attorney 
General to lay open before the country the 
basis for his insinuations or else to cease his 
propaganda. A letter from them to the 
Attorney General, widely published in the 
Negro press, stated that in the nation-wide 
campaign against “Reds and I. W. W. 
agitators”? not a single colored person of the 
United States had, to their knowledge, been 
arrested. Colored people, said the letter, 


would continue to demand every right of 
144 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


American citizenship under the Constitution. 
“These things colored people are agitating 
in the right way and with the proper spirit. 
There is an exceedingly small percentage of 
radical colored newspapers among us, and for 
that reason the colored press as a whole 
should not be labeled as radical, and should 
not be classified with the Reds and I. W. W.’s.” 
It will be remarked that the South’s color. 
psychosis became extended, during the war, 
throughout the nation, not in virtue of 
justifying fact, but chiefly through a press 
campaign initiated by a Southern member of 
the House of Representatives. The conserva- 
tive press treated the Negro very much as an 
alien enemy. His grievances were ignored. 
Numerous articles were published to establish 
how well the Negro was treated in Mississippi, 
_ how prosperous colored people were in Louis- 
jana, how the South wanted colored workers 
to return from the North. But the migration 
northward was continued at the very time 
these inspired stories were appearing in North- 
ern newspapers. 

Although intelligent white Americans did 
not take seriously the innuendoes published 
by the Attorney General and the Depart- 


ment of Justice, propaganda charging the 
10 145 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Negro with “sedition” and “radicalism” 
was undoubtedly contributory to violent feel- 
ing and to conflict. The result was a pre- 
sumption against colored people in the United 
States most oppressive as always to the more 
prosperous and intelligent men and women. 
The report of the Department of Justice, 
which was transmitted to the Senate in 
November, 1919, included a number of pages 
devoted to Negro magazines and newspapers. 
Editorial utterances had become more acid 
and more incisive since the war. The At- 
torney General spoke of “‘sedition” and 
“‘radicalism,’’ but he failed to prosecute. In 
fact, Negro editors were guilty, not of sedition, 
but of indignation at brutalities and wrongs 
which the nation unprotesting had permitted 
to go on. The Attorney General found, 
what every student of race relations might 
have told him he would find, “the increasingly 
emphasized feeling of a race consciousness” 
among colored people. That the Attorney 
General characterized this race feeling as 
“openly, defiantly assertive of its own equal- 
ity” is a commentary on his state of mind 
rather than on the facts. Throughout the 
Negro press, as among orators and the masses 


of workmen and the bourgeoisie, realization 
146 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


had come that the “old Negro” was going 
never to return. Servility and submission to 
wrong had been proved experimentally to be 
poor policy. Those Negroes who followed 
the prescription which Booker Washington 
had offered—work and thrift as opposed to 
political and civil demands—found that their 
work and their merit, whether its measure 
was financial or social, availed them little. 
They found class discrimination increasing, 
and moderate and intelligent white men 
less than ever able, apparently, to check the 
lawlessness represented in lynching and intimi- 
dation of every sort. Colored men found that 
the “good nigger’ who bowed to white 
ascendancy and took orders uncomplainingly 
was eventually despoiled. The Negro who 
stood his ground and cleaved to his rights 
with his manhood and a rifle to defend him 
often won the respect if not the affection of 
his white neighbors. “Shoot Back to Stop 
Riots” is The Boston Herald's caption sum- 
marizing advice given to colored people by 
one of their leaders in November of 1919. 
It is the sort of advice with which they had 
been becoming increasingly familiar and had 
found in practice most effective. 


When the division brought about by the 
147 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


war became sharp, the occasional friend of 
the Negro, the Republican party, again began 
to withdraw. The Negro confronted the 
Democratic party which, no matter what 
liberal impulses it might derive from the 
North, would never help him in the South. 
The Southern Republican party was, as 
always, rent into two factions of which one 
was composed of “‘lily-white” Republicans 
who sought to curry favor with the white 
South by repudiating the Negro, and a lean 
faction which, in order to obtain offices under 
Republican National administrations, sought 
to maintain its influence over the colored 
voter. Politically, therefore, the Negro was 
without real friends. The period of the 
World War and 1919 especially, perhaps, 
became an era of change for colored Ameri- 
cans, who then came to realize as never 
before that only by themselves organizing, 
by defending themselves personally, politi- 
cally, and industrially, could their position 
in the United States be made _ tolerable. 
Colored workers, it will be shown in a later 
chapter, acted independently of white labor 
organizations and were mostly victims, partly 
players, in the contest between capital and 


labor. The character of riots changed in 
148, 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


1919. They were not massacres of colored 
people. White men died. In a number of 
cities in which riots had been planned, notably 
in Memphis, Tennessee, and in Montgomery, 
Alabama, they did not occur because it was 
generally known that colored men were armed 
and were prepared to defend themselves. 

The change, for the most part industrial, 
which the war effected in the South was in 
many respects a revolution. It was hardly 
more difficult for the South to face political 
emancipation of the Negro than to contem- 
plate his industrial emancipation. Both were 
brought in view by war industry and war 
migration. That the war should at once 
make the Negro conscious of his prerogatives 
as a citizen, give him opportunity to earn 
_the gratitude of the nation, make for him 
preferred opportunities as a skilled workman, 
and enable him to leave the agricultural 
communities in which he was most con- 
sciencelessly exploited, was bitter. 

“One of the most serious of the long-stand- 
ing grievances of the Negro,” says the Labor 
Department’s report on the migration of 
1916-17, “‘is the small pay he receives for his 
work in the South.” 


The South’s first response to the migration 
149 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


included attempts to stop it by heavily fining 
and imprisoning labor agents, by intimidation 
of Negro migrants at railway stations, forcing 
many a colored farm tenant to flee by night 
in order to come North. Gradually it was 
realized that the competition of Northern 
industry, with its comparatively lavish wages, 
would have to be met. It also came to be 
understood that Negroes would go where 
their children might have the advantages of 
schooling. It was found that the migration 
was least from the districts in which there 
was no lynching and mobbism, where Negroes 
were permitted to enjoy the products of their 
labor in peace. The elaborate propaganda, 
directed chiefly at Negro migrants in Chicago, 
describing the prosperity and contentment 
of colored people in Louisiana, Texas, and 
Mississippl, was a measure of this under- 
standing. As Mr. Hill has shown, all too 
frequently the news stories represented a 
desirable rather than an actual state of affairs. 
But a general realization by white men that 
the Negro must be satisfied in order to keep 
him on the land, that elements in that satis- 
faction are education for his children, human 
and decent treatment, and eventually even 


that most taboo instrument, the vote, is a 
150 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


long step toward progress in the administration 
of race relations. The war, which first gave 
the South opportunities to exploit Negro 
labor by enactment and enforcement of “‘ work 
or fight” laws, provided the Negro with 
opportunity for bringing his exploiters to 
their senses. 

If the war made the white South more than 
ever determined to show the Negro “his 
place” when he came home from the war 
and from “ Frenchwomen,”’ it made the Negro 
more politically self-conscious than ever before 
in his history in this country. He came to 
look critically upon his erstwhile friends, the 
Republicans. He began to break the mold 
of his former undeviating allegiance in order 
to listen to Socialist, class-conscious propa- 
ganda. He found himself spoken of as a 
race, treated as a political entity within the 
United States, and consequently he began 
to feel the intensified race consciousness of 
which the Attorney General made mention. 
The Negro citizen’s weapon against dis- 
crimination of every sort was his economic 
value. His departure became a grave menace 
to the welfare and even the solvency of many 
portions of the rural South. His arrival in 


the North increased the hostility of trade- 
151 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


union members, but caused the union execu- 
tives seriously to ponder the effect of excluding 
him. However he was treated, his strategic 
position was improved. That is not to be 
taken as a step in the harmonizing of race 
relations. Eventually it may mean that in 
the period of the war the problem of the liv- 
ing together in the same state of colored 
and white men was made immensely more 
urgent and more menacing. The Negro’s 
political education, given an enormous im- 
petus by his war experience, is being carried 
forward. Never before particularly concerned 
in the doctrine of class struggle, he is having 
it preached to him by his own newspapers 
and magazines which are quick to seize upon 
the economic motives of his detractors and 
exploiters. His own experience supplies many 
examples to supplement the arguments of his 
mentors. 

Any colored person of intelligence neces- 
sarily began to analyze his condition in times 
as disturbed and as disturbing as_ those 
during and immediately following the war. 
To both white men and colored men the war 
demonstrated that the Negro has an economic 
place in this country if he is allowed to occupy 


it; that his departure in large numbers from 
152 


CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 


the land in the South means loss in values and 
in productivity; that he is adaptable to 
industry in the North; that he must be 
considered as an element in the industrial 
struggle of capital and labor; and that in 
many a Northern city and state class-con- 
scious or race-conscious appeals to groups of 
white men will be met with the ballot by 
large and increasingly well-organized groups 
of colored people, whose vigilant press keeps 
them informed of what affects their welfare. 
The foregoing summary, like all summaries, is 
over-simplified. It will be shown in subse- 
quent chapters that in many localities the 
Negro is still treated with greater disregard 
and brutality than in slavery days; that his 
oppression cries to all Americans for denuncia- 
tion and redress. But the way of hatred 
cannot stop the new emancipation which the 
war enormously accelerated. At most and 
at worst a policy of repression, misinformation, 
and exploitation can bring about irrecon- 
cilable conflict and tragedy for colored and 
white citizens who might otherwise become 
immensely useful to one another. The old 
anomalies persist. The United States is still 
in the position internationally of a kettle 


when it comes to calling pots black. The 
153 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


South still openly, boastingly even, dis- 
franchises colored citizens. And democracy 
is made in the eyes of the discerning to seem 
far more tentative in the face of race problems 
than its loudest protagonists would have it 
thought. 


VI 
THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


T is in the cities that race relations are 

most poisoned by rumor and myth. No 
group in the nation has paid a heavier toll to 
corrupt municipal politics than the Negro. 
He has paid it not only in bad _ housing, 
inferior schools, poor lighting, paving, and 
policing. He has, besides, been used as a 
tool in elections and as a lightning-rod to 
earry off angers for which he was not in the 
remotest degree responsible. During the period 
of acute change that accompanied and 
followed the migration northward, the use 
of the Negro politically and deliberate at- 
tempts to foment race riots of magnitude 
were established beyond doubt. Many ele- 
ments contributed to the disorders in Wash- 
ington, in Chicago, in Omaha, and in Knox- 
ville. To say they were due to any one 
cause would be to over-simplify. But that a 


major part was played by motives and con- 
155 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


tests outside the control of colored people is 
incontestable. 

In three of the four cities the riots were pre- 
ceded by a press campaign in which Negro 
criminality stared every newspaper reader 
in the eye, in the form of glaring head-lines 
announcing cases of assault and robbery. 
This was true of Washington, Chicago, and 
Omaha. In two of those cities, Washington 
and Omaha, bodies of colored people met and 
sent appeals to the newspapers to desist 
from their dangerous and inflammatory cam- 
paign. Omaha’s riot, in the course of which 
a colored man was without trial shot, hanged, 
and publicly roasted in a city street, the 
mayor hanged until he was nearly dead, the 
court-house gutted and burned and irreplace- 
able records destroyed, occurred on Septem- 
ber 28, 1919. On the 12th of April, six 
hundred members of the Omaha branch of the 
National Association for the Advancement 
of Colored People had met at the Zion Baptist 
Chureh to protest careless remarks of the 
Omaha chief of police and the press campaign. 
The meeting deplored “published cases of 
criminal acts alleged to have been committed 
by colored men,” called attention to the 


emphasis which was put on the race of of- 
156 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


fenders, and urged “that the public press 
be called upon and requested to avoid creating 
a sentiment against the race by using in 
glaring and sensational head-lines expressions 
of special reference to the race.” The resolu- 
tions were sent to the chief of police of Omaha 
and to the principal newspapers. A similar 
appeal was sent to newspaper editors in 
Washington, District of Columbia. In Sep- 
tember the campaign which the press of 
Omaha had carried on despite all warnings bore 
fruit. 

“Jail Burns in Omaha as Riot Rages— 
City in Tumult, Police Helpless as Result 
of Attempt to Lynch Negro Who Attacked 
Girl—Mob Slashes Hose; Prisoners in Peril— 
One Man Killed and Two Wounded—Colored 
Men on Streets Are Beaten.” 

The captions on news stories sent broadcast 
over the nation told the story of what had 
happened on September 28th. “Race Riots 
in Washington Serious—Blacks Chased by 
Mobs Past White House—More Than One 
~Hundred Badly Injured—Ambulances Busy 
All Night—Police Unequal to Situation— 
Marshall and Members of Congress Urge 
Use of Army to Restore Order.” This was 


the story which the captions had told of the 
157 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


National Capital on July 20th and 2\st. 
With minor variants, the stories were similar: 
a record of mobbism in the streets of American 
cities, houses burned, citizens done to death, 
the police helpless and troops enforcing order 
at the point of the bayonet. What the news 
stories did not tell, and never told, was what 
had occurred in the months and years pre- 
ceding to bring such conditions to pass. 
Reference was invariably made at the time 
of riots to the “increase in crime,” to “‘attacks 
upon women, murders, holdups, and _ rob- 
berries’? as being the cause of the disorder. 
Yet the records of the chief of police in 
Washington failed to show the “‘many assaults 
upon women” that the newspapers had been 
using to create a condition of hysteria. His 
statistics showed four assaults upon women 
in the District of Columbia in June and July, 
of which three were attributed to a suspect 
under arrest at the time of the riots. 

A typical example of the manner in which 
the Negro was victimized by the press of 
Washington occurred on August 15th, at a 
time when the memory of the July riots 
should have suggested caution. On its front 
page The Washington Post carried the caption: 


‘Attacked by Negroes—Mrs. Minnie Frank- 
158 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


lin Injured at League Park Carnival—Two 
Assailants Get Away.” There followed ac- 
counts of headquarters detectives searching 
for “two young Negroes”’ who had “‘covered”’ 
the woman with a pistol during the attack. 
On the following day, inconspicuously, on an 
inside page, The Washington Post retracted 
its glaring assertions of the day before with: 
“Calls Assault a ‘Story’ —Mrs. Franklin’s 
Charge Against Two Negroes Dropped by 
Police.’ And it was developed that her 
narrative of the attack was a “fabrication.” 
But the effect of the glaring scarehead of the 
day before could not be nullified and no 
attempt was made by The Washington Post 
to nullify it. « 

Of the Omaha press campaign before the 
disorders, a report by the National Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Colored People 
said: ““Every few days the papers head-line, 
“Negro Has Assaulted a White Woman.’ When 
investigated no truth is found in these state- 
ments. But raids follow and it keeps the 
branch busy seeing that the Negroes picked 
up in these raids are not treated unjustly. 
We have one case in particular in which we 
won a decided victory. A _ sixteen-year-old 


white girl claimed to have been assaulted 
159 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


by a Negro. For many weeks she refused 
to identify any of the Negroes brought before 
her. One day she saw on the street a man 
who fully answered the description of her 
assailant. She called the officer and had 
him arrested. Our committee happened to 
be in court on the day that he was brought 
in. The judge wanted to have his hearing 
right then without giving him a chance to 
prove his whereabouts on that date, but the 
lawyer insisted that he be given a chance. 
His trial was stayed one week. We sent 
telegrams to the men for whom he had worked 
and they answered as to his character; the 
foreman of the section gang with which he 
was working on the date of the alleged assault 
wired, proving an alibi, but the judge would 
not receive that as evidence. Then the fore- 
man came, bringing with him his time-books, 
which had been sent to Chicago and O.K.’d. 
By this means we proved the man innocent 
because he had been over a hundred miles 
away from the scene of the crime at the 
time it was said to have been committed.” 

Another report describes the occurrences 
which were magnified by the newspapers into 
“Negro Assaults upon White Women”: “In 


the case of a boy who was given ninety days,” 
160° 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


says the secretary of the Omaha branch of 
the association, “‘I was in court at the time 
of the trial. The little girl says the boy went 
past her and pulled her dress and she ran. 
The boy was seventeen years old. That 
was criminal assault. 

“T have been at the trial of every case and 
the evidence 1s about as flimsy. One woman 
said that a Negro walked fast behind her. 
She called the police and he was charged 
with criminal assault. In the prison with 
the man who was lynched Sunday was a 
white man under bond for the same crime. 
If they were so eager to protect white woman- 
hood they should have completed their work 
by taking him.” These examples, which could 
be added to indefinitely, indicate the pro- 
cedure. The Negro was to be tarred with the 
odium which is his in the South. “Rapist” 
was to be fastened as a distinguishing char- 
acter to his color. Presumption so strong 
that it affected judges on the bench was 
created against accused Negroes. Not only 
was the Southern myth to take root in the 
North. It was so to affect race relations 
that colored people would be glad to return 
to the South whence they had come. Hence, 


after the Chicago riots the propaganda of 
uW 161 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


improved conditions and prosperity in Lou- 
isiana and Mississippi. Hence the committees 
of white men to induce colored men to go 
South where they “belonged.” 

But it is the involvement of this propa- 
ganda in municipal politics that is to be 
shown. Nowhere was it clearer than in 
Omaha. As the presentation is one of fact, 
I make no apology for quoting at length and 
corroborating the report of a man long identi- 
fied with “‘reform” of Omaha’s city govern- 
ment. ‘There were many causes back of the 
riot in Omaha Sunday night, September 28th,” 
he says. “For forty years Omaha was ruled 
by a political criminal gang that was perhaps 
the most lawless of any city of its size in 
the civilized world. There had grown up 
during that period a powerful group that 
lived on the proceeds of organized vice and 
crime.” ‘The writer enumerates three hun- 
dred and eighty-four houses of prostitution, 
saloons, and pool halls, and includes in the 
group “organized bank robbers, organized 
highway robbers, and professional ‘con’ men 
and burglars’’—a list incredible to any one 
unfamiliar with the vagaries of American 
city government. This group decided in 


conference on the city officers to be elected, 
162 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


“and they would give the Boss for his service 
a certain sum of money and control of the 
vice interests, the police department, the 
police court, the juries, and then proceed to 
elect public officials.” This condition pre- 
vailed without interruption until 1908. In 
that year an eight-o’clock-closing law was 
enacted for saloons and subsequently a jury- 
commissioner law and_ election-machinery 
law, taking both out of control of the “‘vice 
ring.” State-wide prohibition was enacted 
in Nebraska in 1916. “In the spring of 1918, 
with the power of the vice ring thus weakened 
by the advances noted, the old political gang 
was almost destroyed. Thus we had elimi- 
nated the whisky interests . . . but we had 
not eliminated all of the gang. There was 
still left The Omaha .t which had been 
the mouthpiece of the vice ring....’ The 
remnants of former corrupt government com- 
bined “to destroy the present city adminis- 
tration and regain control of the police de- 
partment. . . . In order to accomplish 
this, the paper, assisted at times by the two 
other daily papers, began a campaign of 
slander and vituperation against the police 
department of the city of Omaha, and in 





1 A newspaper, 
163 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


order to make it effective they chose a line of 
propaganda to the effect that Negro men 
were attacking white women, assaulting them 
with intent to commit rape and actually 
committing rape, with the connivance of the 
police department. They made a majority 
of the people of Omaha believe that all 
Negro men were disposed to commit the crime 
of rape on white women.” Attention of the 
mayor and the commissioner and chief of 
police was called to the association of lewd 
white women with colored men, and city 
officers were asked to get rid of both elements 
“for the safety of the colored people and the 
community.” Police raids stimulated the 
press campaign against the administration, 
and the impression was created that the police 
were invading private residences without 
warrant and were arresting law-abiding citi- 
zens. The difficulties of the administration 
were intensified by remnants in the police 
department of adherents of the old vice 
ring, who “were doing everything within 
their power to hamper and discredit the 
honest efforts of the present city adminis- 
tration to enforce the law.” The statement 
of Omaha’s chief of police as to the com- 


position of the mob, quoted in an earlier 
164 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


chapter, is borne out by this citizen, who says 
there was “in connection with the mob, 
fathered by these same influences, an organized 
gang determined to wreck the administration 
at any cost, and they deliberately organized 
a mob, furnished it with money and liquor, 
and the leaders of the old vice ring stood 
round in the mob urging the men to go in 
and assist in wrecking the court-house, lynch 
the Negro, and kill the mayor of the city, 
the commissioner of police, one of the police 
magistrates, and the morals squad, a group 
of detectives that had been relentless in 
enforcing the law against the criminal ele- 
ment.’ A police captain, the senior in the 
police department, who released fifty police 
officers on the afternoon of the riotous Sun- 
day and sent them to their homes, is described 
as “a member of the old criminal gang”’ 
who had “served as a personal bodyguard, 
with another crooked police officer, to the 
‘boss’ of the underworld.” Some of the 
police officers were said to be in the mob 
encouraging attacks upon colored police offi- 
cers who were endeavoring to maintain order. 
“The only reason the commissioner of police 
escaped was because, at the suggestion of 


the mayor and others, he was sufficiently 
165 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


disguised in his appearance to get out of the 
jail without being killed by the mob.” The 
innocence is asserted of the Negro, William 
Brown, who was lynched, a contention which 
in view of his murder without trial can neither 
be established nor controverted. 

“There have been published in the daily 
papers since May 1, 1919, thirty-six dif- 
ferent cases of alleged attacks of colored 
men on white women,” the informant con- 
tinues, ‘““and wherever there was any reference 
to an attack on a woman by any man the in- 
ference was always there that the man com- 
mitting the assault was a Negro—that is 
to say, In no case was it ever stated where 
a white man had attacked a woman that the 
man making the attack was white.”” One such 
story was published in the inflamed state 
of the public mind immediately following 
the riot on October Ist. “Another Woman 
Is Victim of a Negro in Guarded Omaha,” 
announced a scarehead of The New York 
World on October 2d. In the course of the 
news account occurs the following paragraph: 
“General Wood issued a statement at mid- 
night in which he said Mrs. Wisner’s account 
of the attack was incomplete and in part 


indefinite. ‘There are some curious features 
166 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


to the case,’ he said, ‘Mrs. Wisner is unable 
to give any detailed account of what hap- 
pened; she is unable to say positively whether 
her assailant was a white man or a Negro, 
although she seems to think that he was a 
Negro.’”’ In the prevailing hysteria it would 
not be difficult to “‘seem to think” any 
assailant a Negro. The elements leading to 
the Omaha riot are summarized by the 
informant as being three: ‘(1) an element 
that wanted to lynch a Negro because it was 
led to believe by propaganda that the Negroes 
were really committing these offenses against 
white women and were being inadequately 
punished for their offenses; (2) there was a 
political mob bent upon wreaking vengeance 
by the killing of the city officials, and (3) 
still another mob bent upon destroying all 
organized government and property, public 
and private.” 

The foreman of Omaha’s grand jury, 
John W. Towle, substantiated in the main 
the statements of this citizen of Omaha. In 
submitting the jury’s report he asserted 
that a primary cause of the riot was “a con- 
certed effort on the part of certain citizens, 
officials, and part of the press to discredit 


the police force.” “‘It is a well-known fact,” 
167 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


said Mr. Towle’s letter, “that there are 
two factions in the city and county political 
life. Those who believe in enforcement of 
law and order now have the control of the 
city commission and the police force. The 
leaders of the opposition have very frankly 
stated that they are in favor of certain kinds 
of vice, limited to restricted areas; that 
instead of licensing or suppressing same it 
should be openly tolerated. This system 
was in force during the past administrations 
and is capable of most extensive commer- 
clalism.”” Mr. Towle then asserted, as a 
matter of common knowledge, that “‘at least 
one party on Saturday night previous” to 
the riot went about to pool-rooms announcing 
that an attack would be made on the court- 
house “for the purpose of lynching this 
colored man.’ Such reports, he said, “were 
current about the city and were known in 
certain official circles, and just why this 
prisoner was not moved to the state peni- 
tentiary or some other suitable place for safe- 
keeping has never been satisfactorily ex- 
plained, nor why these officials did not 
apprise Mayor Smith, Commissioner Ringer, 
and Chief Eberstein of their knowledge.” 


Further corroboration came from the County 
168 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


Attorney in Omaha, who, in a_ statement 
published by The Omaha Evening World- 
Herald of October Ist, lists in detail the “‘fake”’ 
stories used to discredit the police adminis- 
tration and to incite to riot. “One of the 
most popular of the fake stories that were 
used to incite the riot,” he said in the course 
of his statement, ““was that a colored man 
had attempted to assault a nine-year-old 
girl, was arrested, identified, and given ninety 
days in the county jail. The facts are 
that the little girl saw this Negro, and thought 
he was quickening his step toward her. She 
ran and told her mother. The Negro was 
arrested, but there was no evidence that he 
had even touched the girl or even run after 
her. . . . Still another story, positively false, 
was used in stirring up feeling that preceded 
the riot. It was said that a colored man 
was arrested for an assault upon a white 
woman, and that she identified him, but 
that he was later discharged. In this case 
her identification was very weak, and the 
prisoner established a positive alibi, bringing 
in from Iowa the white foreman of a road 
gang of the Illinois Central Railroad, who 
showed by his time-checks that the suspect 


was in Iowa on the day of the assault, and at 
169 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


work.” The County Attorney draws a 
proper conclusion, “This sort of propaganda 
must cease, because it is false and incites to 
riot.” The Governor of Nebraska made pub- 
lic acknowledgment of the dangerous propa- 
ganda when he remarked on September 30th 
that those ““who have most to do with the 
molding of public opinion have constantly 
engaged in petty kickerings and criticism 
of the local officials which could not result 
in any but an utter disrespect of the law” 
(New York Tribune, October 1st). It was 
important for citizens of Omaha, said the 
Governor, to “organize their minds to dis- 
courage the activities of those who are con- 
stantly attempting to bring reproach upon 
public officials.” 

Industrial conflict formed, as is usually 
the case, an element in the Omaha municipal 
complex. The president of the Nebraska 
State Federation of Labor blamed the im- 
portation from the South of non-union Negroes 
for the disorder. “Crimes against women 
form the basis,” he is quoted as saying 
(New York World, October 2d), “but the 
mob was given impetus by causes that 
are not apparent on the surface.” Among 


these causes he enumerates the attempt 
170 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


by the “great employers of labor, including 
the packers,’ to “break down the wages 
of white labor’? with imported Negro labor 
and the mayor’s use of Negro labor “to 
fight the cause of capital against the just 
cause of the workingmen.’’ ‘“‘ When the team- 
sters two months ago were on strike and 
were fighting for a living wage it was the 
mayor who put to work the ignorant Negroes 
of the South. He placed them on wagons. 
He used them as _ strike-breakers.”’ Even 
this laborite has been “‘stuffed’’ with stories 
of assaults by Negroes upon white women. 
But he makes it quite clear that the white 
workman of Omaha does not want black 
men used to hold down wages. “If brought 
North they (the Negroes) must not be brought 
to fight the battles of capitalism. Every 
packer, every large employer knows what I 
mean by that.” And of “the moment” when 
feeling in Omaha overflowed the shallow 
container called civilization, this laborite 
remarked: ‘‘Mayor Smith was regarded as 
an enemy. This feeling did not start the 
attempt to lynch him, but it helped to carry 
it along.” 

It will be seen that a detailed examination 


of the state of citizenship and city govern- 
171 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


ment in Omaha disintegrates “Negro Crime” 
as a cause of the riot of September, 1919. 
Properly, as The New York Evening Post 
remarked, the outburst could hardly be called 
a “race riot.” Yet that was its characteriza- 
tion in newspaper scareheads throughout the 
nation. <A casual or even an attentive reader 
of the news would have been forced to the 
conclusion that white men had been goaded 
to fury by repeated and unpunished attacks 
upon their women by colored men. Hidden 
and isolated paragraphs from various news 
accounts had to be gathered and assembled 
to give some picture of the moving forces 
which, according to the head of Nebraska’s 
Federation of Labor, were not apparent on 
the surface. It is the surface only which the 
press scratches in its accounts of race rela- 
tions. Where the press is used, as it was in 
Omaha, to be a tool in political contest, no 
analysis and exposition is to be expected 
for the people whom it is intended to bedazzle 
and to delude. The casual and adventitious 
reporter descending zestfully upon a scene 
of riot from otherwhere may absorb political 
gossip, and usually does. But he is expected 
to write about what happened, not about 


how or why it happened. His impressions 
172 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


are what people elsewhere in the nation, as 
well as the moralists and ethical guides who 
write editorials, are given to read. In the 
nature of existing news service, then, when 
part of the machinery of news distribution 
is the organ of political and moneyed factions 
and the rest of it is for the most part casual 
and superficial in its attack upon current 
events, the pictures created for the public 
of race relations and race disturbances must 
necessarily be grotesque caricatures. 

Without duplicating or paralleling motives 
and events in Omaha, other centers of dis- 
turbance have presented situations obviously 
analogous. Mr. Carl Sandburg has made the 
political implications of the Chicago “race 
riots” tolerably perspicuous. He _ referred 
especially to a “‘city administration decisive 
in its refusal to draw the color line, and a 
mayor whose opponents failed to defeat 
him with the covert circulation of the epithet 
of ‘nigger-lover.’” “The Black Belt of 
Chicago,” said Mr. Sandburg, “is probably 
the strongest effective unit of political power, 
good or bad, in America.”” It was the Second 
Ward, formerly one of the best residence 
districts of the city, now including much of 


the Black Belt, that was credited with having 
173 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


elected Mayor William Hale Thompson in 
April of 1919. The Second Ward gave him 
more than 11,000 votes of the plurality of 
some 17,500 by which he was elected. Main- 
taining that Mayor Thompson was elected 
by the Negro vote of Chicago, an editorial, 
expressive of what many men were thinking, 
said of him: “ ...He Jost much support, 
but made it up among those who cared 
nothing about such issues. Two white men 
practically control the Negro vote. These 
two men demanded concessions from the 
Thompson crowd in return for this solid 
vote. They received it in the shape of con- 
cessions to saloons, cabarets, dance-halls, 
and dives of various sorts. In the Black 
Belt all kinds of places were kept open till 
morning, while in other parts of the city 
they were required to close at 1 a.m.” ‘Testi- 
mony is uniform that the colored residence 
district was made to suffer from lax police ad- 
ministration, and that the exploitation of its 
voting power was in the hands of gambling- 
house keepers, white and black, and their pa- 
trons. “‘W.M. Bass has been operating craps 
and poker games night and day in the rear of a 
real-estate office on East Thirty-first Street,” 


said Mr. Sandburg, “near Cottage Grove 
174 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


Avenue. From an alley entrance at 3512 South 
State Street one may enter a temple of chance 
conducted by one MecFallin. Two men known 
as ‘Williams’ and ‘Kennedy’ maintain a labo- 
ratory for the study of the laws of chance on 
South State Street, near Thirty-fifth Street, 
entrances front and rear. T. Jones has a 
similar laboratory on South State Street, 
near Thirty-ninth Street, second floor, front 
and rear entrances.” Mr. Sandburg’s ac- 
count of the gambler’s Mecca in the colored 
residence district hardly lacks circumstantial- 
ity. As for the victims of the gamblers, “who 
are naturally also the victims of the police who 
let the gamblers run the kind of games that are 
run: ... Within two blocks were found a 
total of eighty-three families where 96 per 
cent. of the boys were truants from the public 
schools, and 72 per cent. of these boys were 
retarded ai least one year by reason of truancy. 
In most cases the parents were away from 
home so much that they were out of touch 
with the children. ... In thirty-one cases 
the father had ‘deserted,’ which means he 
is tired, dead, sick, or gone wrong from 
unknown causes. ... In twenty-eight cases 
the father was a heavy drinker.”’ 


Where a mayor is elected by the vote of a 
175 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


colored district; where the reward is given 
in the form of protection and immunity 
for those who profit from vice; where the 
mayor is known as a ‘nigger-lover’ in virtue 
of his administration’s exploitation of colored 
voters—it is not difficult to demonstrate the 
connection of ill feeling between white and 
black men and politics. But it was not only 
by immunity to dive-keepers that the colored 
district was invidiously distinguished. In 
November of 1919, four months after the 
July riots, at the time when race antagonism 
was still vivid, accusations of discrimination 
were made in the distribution of funds for 
street cleaning. “Black Belt Favored in 
Cleaning Streets”? read the caption of a 
Chicago newspaper. The news story reported 
that, although streets elsewhere were filthy, 
‘the Black Belt ward, credited with re-elect- 
ing Mayor Thompson, has not suffered in the 
care of its streets and alleys because of the 
financial stringency. . . . The Fourteenth 
Ward, which was carried by Mayor Thomp- 
son because of the heavy vote he obtained in 
the Westlake Street colored district, was not 
among those hit by the high cost of keeping 
the city clean.” 


Industrial or political as the causes of 
176 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


disturbance may be shown to be, “race riots” 
is the careless descriptive term employed to 
designate it. A riot of more Southern com- 
plexion than that of Chicago occurred in 
Knoxville, Tennessee, in the last days of 
August, 1919. “Troops Fight Race Rioters 
in Knoxville,’ announced The New York 
Times of September 1, 1919; ““Two Known 
Dead, More Than Score Injured After Two 
Days of Lawlessness—Army Lieutenant Killed 
—<Accidentally Shot by Machine-gunners Who 
Were Firing on Attacking Negro Party—Mobs 
Loot Many Stores—Several Murderers Re- 
leased in Attack on Jail, which Is Plundered of 
Money and Whisky.” To judge by the caption 
a full-fledged race riot was in progress in Knox- 
ville in which Negroes had formed themselves 
into “attacking parties.” The uproar in 
which shops were looted, confiscated whisky 
stolen from the jail, “everything of value, 
including money, guns, whisky, clothing, and 
books,” was taken, part of the jail records 
were destroyed, and white men convicted 
of murder were released from their cells and 
given liberty, was ascribed to one colored 
man who was referred to as the “cause of 
mob’s riot.”” He was accused—but had not 


been tried—of killing a white woman by shoot- 
12 177 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


ing. The “race riot” of Knoxville assumed 
a different complexion, however, when R. A. 
Mynatt, the local Attorney-General, was 
quoted in a despatch to The New York Sun 
of September 5th as being “‘satisfied that 
these men were bent on releasing white 
prisoners and looting, and camouflaged their 
work by pretending to want to lynch the 
Negro, Maurice Mays, then and now in jail 
at Chattanooga.” The evidence obtained 
at the trial of white men arrested for looting 
and mobbism showed “that they did not 
visit the Negro floor, once they had gained 
entrance to the jail,’ and that “they set about 
at once to release prisoners and to plunder.” 
An inconspicuous news despatch published 
in the Sun the following day, September 6th, 
bore the important information that “the 
old city fof Knoxville] was Democratic 
by a small majority, but the new city is 
Republican by from fifteen hundred to three 
thousand, depending on the way the women 
vote. Failure of the city and county officials 
in co-operating to prevent the recent out- 
break between the races here has become a 
sharp issue In to-morrow’s contests. A mayor 
will be elected and the eight highest of twenty 


candidates will engage in a run-off two weeks 
178 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


later to fill four places on the City Com- 
mission.” ‘The despatch is headed: ‘“‘Knox- 
ville Negroes Determine to Vote—Race Riots 
Laid to City Officers in Campaign Fight.’ The 
composition of the mob is indicated by the 
fact that of the first fifteen white prisoners 
to testify, only five had never been convicted 
or indicted before. The convictions against 
the others ranged “‘from one to more than a 
dozen,” according to The Knoxville Sentinel, 
“‘and from small offenses to some of a more 
serious nature.” Nevertheless, the Knoxville 
grand jury declined to indict the prisoners. 
Attorney-General Mynatt characterized pro- 
ceedings aS a miscarriage of justice and 
announced publicly that so long as he was 
connected with the criminal court none of 
the jurors would ever again serve on a jury. 
These facts, inconspicuous, or unpublished 
to the public, which had read in huge type 
of Tennessee troops fighting Negro race 
rioters, because a Negro criminal had mur- 
dered a white woman, hardly affected public 
information regarding conditions in Knox- 
ville. Neither did the fact that Maurice 
Mays, the accused Negro, had been an 
active solicitor for votes in behalf of one 


of the candidates for mayor. 
179 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 
To The New York Sun of September 4th 


must be given credit for two further para- 
graphs illuminating the series of outrages. 
‘Politicians, rival candidates for mayor in 
Saturday’s election, are attempting,” says 
one paragraph, “‘to capitalize the recent out- 
rage to their advantage.” “‘Members of the 
city police force,” says the next paragraph 
but one, “passed out rifles and ammunition 
to members of the mob who broke into hard- 
ware-stores and pawn-shops.” 

Municipal politics did not, in Washington, 
play the same part as in Chicago, Omaha, 
and Knoxville. Appointive as is the Com- 
mission Government of the District of Colum- 
bia, there could be no such obvious intent 
to discredit the commissioners for electioneer- 
ing purposes. However, the Washington po- 
lice had been asking for increased pay and 
there had been agitation for new appoint- 
ments to the force. In the House of Repre- 
sentatives, the mobbism in Washington’s 
streets was at once turned to the account 
of the anti-prohibitionists, who asserted that 
prohibition encouraged just that sort of law- 
lessness. Washington’s chief of police, fur- 
thermore, connected the obscene head-line 


display with which The Washington Times 
180 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


and The Washington Post greeted every new 
crime with the manifest desire of anti-prohi- 
bitionists to prove their contention that pro- 
hibition would be accompanied by a “crime 
wave.” On the first page of The Washington 
Post of July 23d, a page lurid with lists of 
riot victims, tales of violence and brutality, 
one column had for its caption “*Dry Bill’ 
Is Passed.”” The juxtaposition is the more 
significant in that to The Washington Post 
as much as to any one agency was due the 
hysterical fear and hatred which made the 
Washington excesses possible. Intoxicating 
liquor and race conflict occurred as twin 
considerations not only to The Washington 
Post, but to Representative Julius Kahn of 
California, a state favorably known for its 
grapes. On the occasion of his eighty-fifth 
birthday Cardinal Gibbons was interviewed 
by a representative of The New York World. 
On that solemn occasion the prelate took the 
occasion to say: “‘We are now afflicted with a 
war of races in the National Capital, where 
much blood has already been shed and lives 
sacrificed. Alas! it is a proof that a legislative 
suppression of intoxicating drinks is not, as 
it was said it would be, a panacea against all 


social and moral evils.”’ 
181 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Washington has been adverted to as the 
meeting-ground of Southern and Northern 
attitudes on race matters. Southern senti- 
ment looked hopefully to the outcome of the 
conflict in the capital’s streets. Disgust was 
written not only on the faces of Southern 
Representatives, but in Southern newspapers, 
at the “leniency”? with which colored people 
had been treated. It will be recalled that the 
riots had begun in a raid by white soldiers 
and sailors upon the colored residence district 
and the beating of unoffending colored men 
on the streets. Yet, said the Washington 
correspondent of a Memphis, Tennessee, news- 
paper on July 24th: “Southern Democrats 
here were sore to the core to-day. They were 
disgusted at the alien and ‘uplift’ radicals 
who prevented real action to clear up the 
situation.” The “Southerners in the capital” 
were “disgusted beyond words with the 
actions of the District government, and the 
national administration, which acted almost 
entirely with a view of protecting the 
Negroes.” The disgust was _ all-inclusive. 
“From Secretary of War Baker down to 
Chief of Police Pullman the entire conduct 
of the’ government during the riots was 


characterized by sissyism. ‘The influence of 
182 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


aliens and of New England Negro elements 
prevented the vigorous policy which would 
have been pursued even in New York, to say 
nothing of Southern cities.” The Southern 
remedy for conflict is then indicated: “The 
police failed to round up all Negroes and 
disarm them, as would have been done in 
any Southern city or almost any other place.”’ 
The consequence of disarming the colored 
people of Washington, supposing that to 
have been possible, could hardly have been 
imagined, much less described. For, in the 
first two days of disorder, what kept white 
mobs from pillage, assault, incendiarism, and 
murder in the colored district of Washington 
was not police, but pistols and rifles in the 
hands of colored men. 

Race tension in cities, it has been indicated, 
is definitely subject to manipulation by politi- 
eal leaders and their allies in newspaper 
offices. If that lesson was not learned in 
1919, it will never be and the future of race 
relations in the United States is an ominous 
one. It is idle to talk about “‘solving the 
race problem” when cheap and mendacious 
newspapers, making claims to utmost respect- 
ability, are purchasable by political factions 


and deprive Americans of the one essential 
183 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


to democracy—accurate information on mat- 
ters of public concern. The conditions in 
each of the cities whose riots have been 
examined does not differ essentially from 
that which prevails in the nation at large. 
The Negro’s position is prejudiced by the 
Southern color psychosis whose victims pro- 
claim their dogma with religious fervor. The 
Negro has been used as a bogy or a scapegoat, 
as the case may be, in the argument of every 
political and social question, from prohibition 
to the League of Nations. He has been 
stereotyped in the public mind as a criminal 
and a degenerate, and has therefore become a 
proper object of fear and hatred with which 
to play upon the imaginations of a misin- 
formed electorate. It will be the work of 
years to undo the poisonous and anti-social 
accomplishments of such organs as The Omaha 
Bee, The Washington Post and The Times, The 
Chicago Evening Post, The New York Times, 
in fact, of the majority of American news- 
papers. 

For the future, however, American public 
opinion can assure to itself certain minima 
of decency. It should be possible to prosecute 
newspapers which publish exaggerated and 


mendacious accounts of crime. It should be 
184 


THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS 


possible to discountenance the word “Negro”’ 
in bold head-lines when it is obvious the inten- 
tion is to provoke hysteria that can find a 
vent only in mobbism and murderous brutality. 
It should be possible for white Americans to 
show Negro Americans in cities of the United 
States that they have some stake in city 
administration other than that which they 
now so often have to obtain through the 
political ingenuity of a few corrupt leaders. 
For the present, the only course for white 
Americans to pursue is to cultivate thorough- 
going skepticism as to everything which 
American newspapers publish about the 
Negro; and for colored Americans to iIn- 
sist, in so far as avenues of communication 
are not closed to them, on the facts being 
made known. Meanwhile, occurrences such as 
smudged the red, white, and blue of 100-per- 
cent. Americanism during 1919 suggest that 
there is work to be done in establishing 
government or at least peace in American 
cities. 


Vil 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


I 


Labor 
qe World War helped to dispel the myth 


that the American Negro was at best an 
agricultural laborer only and that complicated 
industrial processes overtaxed his abilities. 
That myth was dispelled in the factories where 
colored workmen did white men’s work and did 
as well as, and often better than, immigrants 
from Europe. In the course of the practical 
demonstration of their capacity as machinists 
and factory operatives, colored men not only 
established themselves in the North; their pros- 
perity exerted a pull on their friends in the 
South, so that the migration, even after the 
signing of the armistice, alarmed Southern 
communities whose labor supply was being 
depleted. The immigration intensified many 


of the maladjustments of industrial society. 
186 





THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


Congestion and overcrowding occurred in the 
cities to which the colored workers came. 
Bitter antagonisms were brought about be- 
tween white labor unions and unorganized 
colored workers. Many white people, who 
had known color prejudice only in the off- 
hand way of contempt, found their emotions 
feverishly active when their men and colored 
men competed for jobs or when, during a 
strike, places were filled with Negroes im- 
ported by hundreds from Alabama, Missis- 
sippi, or Georgia. The increased tension 
between the races to which the northward 
movement contributed had two main deter- 
minants. First, recognition by Northern in- 
dustrialists that they must find some source of 
cheap labor to compensate the stoppage of 
immigration during the war, and that Southern 
Negroes were available for their purposes. 
Second, a realization by white labor-unionists 
that their unions were endangered by an 
influx of aliens, unorganized, distrustful of 
labor unions and therefore difficult and in 
many cases impossible, for the time, to 
unionize. What has been called “group pro- 
tection” became a strong motive among 
white unionists. Independent as it was of 


racial antipathy—for hostility would have 
187 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


been directed against any laborers who threat- 
ened union standards—it speedily fastened 
on the color line. Thus, from the industrial 
movements and readjustments incident to 
the war grew new race conflict. 

For the Negro, war-time opportunity was 
especially significant in that it enabled him, 
as he had never been able to do, to play with 
capital and with labor. In a short space of 
time Negroes found themselves preferred 
in many plants from which they had previ- 
ously been excluded or where they had been 
employed in small numbers only. Their 
leaders urged them not to serve as strike- 
breakers, just as the more intelligent of the 
white union leaders had warned against 
dividing labor by the color line. In practice, 
white unionists had discriminated against 
the Negro, had given him no jobs when the 
allotments were made, or the most arduous 
and disagreeable work; had either discouraged 
his joining their unions or had made it virtu- 
ally impossible for him to do so. In practice, 
the Negro, indoctrinated with the brother- 
hood of man and the common interests of all 
labor, irrespective of color, took advantage 
of the situation which presented itself. Col- 


ored workers in many instances saw no reason 
188 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


why, having always been made victims of. 
white discrimination, they should fight the 
white unionists’ battles. 

The Negro’s distrust of unionism, justified 
as it has been by discrimination in the North, 
is based on the treatment of colored labor 
in the South. It has been the rule to exclude 
Negroes from white unions. In June of 
1919 it was reported that two thousand 
white unionists of Richmond, Virginia, had 
withdrawn from the Virginia Federation of 
Labor because W. C. Page, a Negro of New- 
port News, had been seated as a delegate. 
Under the circumstances, the American Fed- 
eration of Labor at its spring meeting in 
1919 indulged in a more or less empty gesture 
in voting, with but one dissenting voice, to 
admit Negroes to full membership. As is 
known, the Federation exercises little power 
over its constituent international unions. At 
the same convention at which the vote was 
taken, a representative of the Brotherhood 
of Railway Clerks justified the exclusion of 
Negroes from their union and announced that 
the color line would be drawn in the future 
as it had in the past. One of the colored 
delegates to the convention reported that in 


Virginia,from March to April, 1919, forty-three 
189 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


thousand Negro workmen had been obliged , 
to join an independent labor union because 
they could not be received into those affiliated 
with the American Federation of Labor. 
The influence of Southern delegates to the 
Federation had always prevented effective 
measures to organize Negroes. Even where 
the constitution of the union contained no 
express prohibition, it was not uncommon 
for white membership to double while no 
Negroes were added, in an industry giving 
employment to both white and colored men. 
It is recounted in Epstein’s The Negro Migrant 
in Pittsburgh that one labor leader reported 
a growth in membership of 100 per cent. in 
six months, in the Pittsburgh district. He 
said that there were no colored men in the 
union, although numbers had applied for 
membership and complaints had been made 
of discrimination. 

“His statement concerning efforts to or- 
ganize Negro laborers,” the investigator com- 
ments, ““would seem to have little meaning 
in view of his assertion that the growth of 
white membership during the past year was 
100 per cent., while that of Negro member- 
ship was zero.” This man’s attitude is 


found typical of the “‘complacent trade-union- 
190 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


ist.’ At the very time when it was claimed 
that the union was endeavoring to organize 
Negro workers, a white man who joined 
was reported to have been pledged as follows 
by the president of the union: “I pledge 
that I will not introduce for membership 
into this union any one but a sober, indus- 
trious WHITE person.” Among labor lead- 
ers, too, are men born in the South, convinced 
that the Negro is inferior, and strongly 
adherent to the advantages of segregation 
and “‘Jim-Crowing.” ‘Through the influence 
of individual labor leaders and of delegates 
to the Federation, the Southern practice 
was made fairly general in the North while 
Negroes were not in a position to constitute 
a menace to unionism. With the demand 
for Negro labor to supply war-time and 
after-war needs, the scene changed. The 
Federation made its gesture of generosity. 
Unions whose strikers were being replaced 
suddenly discovered the brotherhood of man. 
The Negro found himself in a position of 
strategic importance. His skepticism regard- 
ing the advances of white unionists found 
expression in such news paragraphs as the 
following, from The St. Louis Argus, of July 


18,1919: ‘The recent Atlantic City meeting 
191 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


of the American Federation of Labor, at which 
the ‘hand of fellowship’ was offered the 
colored man, has not caused tradesmen of 
the race to jump pell-mell into the union 
band-wagon. In fact, it seems to have pro- 
duced a reverse effect. The Negroes realize 
that they have become an important part 
of the working-class in industrial sections. 
The unions have, in the past, obstinately 
refused to admit them to membership or else 
placed them in auxiliary locals without direct 
representation. They cannot believe that 
this sudden change of heart is not backed 
by some ulterior motive.” Every sort of 
opposition was offered the Negro during his 
progress to industrial bargaining power. Mr. 
Roger Baldwin, who worked as a manual 
laborer in the Middle West during October 
and November of 1919, writes: ! 
“Everywhere, of course, the Negroes had 
the hardest and most disagreeable jobs. Only 
the exceptional Negro had risen above the 
lowest paid day-labor rate. That’s the rate 
IT was getting, too! And it was these men 
I found really thinking, keenly conscious 
of the relation of their own problem to the 
race and to labor. Every one of the men 


1 Memorandum for which I am indebted to Mr. Baldwin. 
192 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


was in favor of unions, but every one of 
them complained of union discrimination 
against the Negro. They are ready for 
organization which they feel would be fair 
to them. 

“On the other hand, there was a feeling 
of desperation because of the almost universal 
ignoring or contempt of the Negro. Every 
man I spoke to talked of warfare between 
the races. All of them had arms or were 
going to get them. All of them were pre- 
paring to resist further invasion of what they 
regarded as their rights. They just didn’t 
seem to have faith that white men, even 
in the unions, were going to make common 
cause with them. Even the scabs in the 
steel-mill at Homestead, Pennsylvania, where 
Negroes have been imported by the thousand, 
were all for the union and all for a strike at the 
right time, but they felt that they owed noth- 
ing to white men who had so long ignored 
and oppressed them. Not a single organizer 
had been sent into the Pittsburgh steel dis- 
trict. . . . I couldn’t help but feel, as I 
looked around at the forces lined up about 
me, that the immediate future of American 
labor in many industrial centers depends 


on what the unions will do with the Negro. 
13 193 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


It is the white man’s job if he is to 
make the solidarity of labor a living fact.” 
Mr. Baldwin found no “theoretical radi- 
calism”? among the Negroes. “I found,” 
he says, “no trace of ‘Red’ propaganda, 
but I found observations and _ conclusions 
expressed in as ‘Red’ terms as I have ever 
heard them from a soap-box agitator. It 
is obvious that the conditions themselves 
produce radical thinking.” 

Discrimination against Negro labor bore 
fruit in the steel strike of 1919. The con- 
ditions which materially helped to engender 
the East St. Louis riots and the Chicago 
disorders were reproduced. Despite opposi- 
tion in the South, where labor recruiters and 
agents risked death at the hands of a mob 
if their errand were made known, Negroes 
were brought North. Negro welfare workers 
were employed at the Homestead and Du- 
quesne plants of the Carnegie Steel Company, 
at the Monessen plant of the Pittsburgh 
Steel Company, and by the Lockhart Iron 
and Steel Company. Three of the four basic 
mills of the United States Steel Corporation 
and the largest of the independent mills 
pursued the policy of encouraging employment 


of Negroes, During the first six weeks of the 
194 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


steel strike six thousand Negroes, it was 
estimated, were brought to Allegheny County. 
At Lackawanna before the strike there were 
said to be seven thousand employees, of 
whom seventy-two were Negroes. During 
the strike the mill was operated chiefly with 
Negro labor. Some of the steel-mills em- 
ployed Negro preachers. Early in November 
a representative of the Urban League said 
that Negroes in the steel-works had remained 
at work during the strike almost to a man. 
There were, of course, exceptions, but in 
general, however favorably they were disposed 
to white labor unions, Negroes became effec- 
tive instruments to be used against white 
unions. If the vote of the American Federa- 
tion of Labor to unionize Negroes was an 
anticipation and a recognition of the menace 
of a division of labor along color lines, that 
state of mind found recognition in the South. 
For the first time to any marked extent white 
labor realized the necessity for making allies 
of colored workers. Any such general change 
of front by white workmen would menace the 
very foundations of the color line as it is 
drawn in the South. It is, therefore, signif- 
icant to note what extraordinary measures 


were adopted to prevent a coalition of white » 
195 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


and colored labor. As always, the advocates 
of the color line brought about violence to 
sustain the division. It is a melodramatic 
episode which reveals the forces which were at 
work in the South. 

In Bogalusa, Louisiana, on November 22, 
1919, three white men were shot dead, and a 
number were severely wounded. One of the 
men killed was district president of the 
American Federation of Labor; another was 
a union carpenter. The white men were 
killed, according to reports in the newspapers, 
because they had walked, armed, down the 
main street of Bogalusa, protecting with their 
lives and guns the life of a colored labor or- 
ganizer. “‘“The black man,” says Miss Mary 
White Ovington,! “had dared to organize 
in a district where organization meant at the 
least exile, at the most death by lynching.” 
In the town where his white protectors were 
shot dead for refusing to give him up, the 
controlling lumber company had in the fall 
of 1919 ordered twenty-five hundred union 
men to destroy their union cards. “The 
company, said Miss Ovington, “has at its 
command the Loyalty League, a state organi- 
zation formed during the war, not of soldiers, 


1 The Liberator, January, 1920. 
196 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


but of men at home, part of whose business 
it was to see that every able-bodied man 
(Negro understood) should work at any 
task, at any wage, and for any hours that the 
employer might desire. They had back of 
them the state ‘work or fight’ law and might 
put to work men temporarily unemployed 
save that the provision of the Act did not 
apply to ‘persons temporarily unemployed 
by reasons of differences with their employers 
such as strikes or lockouts.’ Under this 
legislation it was small wonder that unionism 
was forbidden by the lumber company; or 
that, unionism continuing, despite the mas- 
ter’s mandate, the Loyalty League, though 
the war was ended, continued its work.” 
It was in the continuance of this “work”’ 
that the Negro organizer was hunted and the 
three white union men who protected him 
were shot down. 

The account of the affair published in 
The New York Times of November 23, 1919, 
is worthy of quotation for its frankness: ! 

“Trouble between the Loyalty League, 
which includes ex-service men and representa- 
tive[s| of the Great Southern Lumber Company 
and other business interests on the one hand, 


1 [talics mine. 
197 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


and union labor, ...on the other, began last 
night after about five hundred armed mem- 
bers of the League held up a train half a 
mile from the railroad station and searched it 
for undesirables. After the search had failed 
to reveal any one whose presence was unwel- 
come, the crowd started to find a Negro who 
was said to have been active recently in trying 
to stir up bad feeling among his race against 
the whites. The search, continued until a 
late hour, was unsuccessful. 

“This morning, to the surprise of the 
Loyalty League men, the Negro they sought 
emerged from his hiding-place and walked 
boldly down the principal street of the town. 
On either side of him was an armed white 
man.... In view of the protection of the 
Negro by white union men, the contention 
of the Loyalty Leaguers is significant: “They 
said the black man had been trying to cause 
race-rioting and that they did not intend 
to permit him to stay there.” It would seem 
that the black man had been an extraordinary 
organizer of race riots to enlist white men 
as his defenders. ‘“‘Rallying their forces 
quickly, the Loyalty Leaguers forced the 
three to retreat to an automobile garage. 


When called upon to surrender the Negro, 
198 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


the men in the garage refused, and firmg 
began. Williams, Bouchillon, and Gaines sac- 
rificed their lives in protecting the Negro, 
whose name [Saul Dechus] was not learned, 
and O’Rourke received fatal wounds.” The 
connection of business‘and “‘loyalty”’ is further 
indicated in a subsequent despatch, published 
in The New York Globe November 24, 1919, 
which refers to “‘members of the ‘Loyalty 
- League,’ made up partly from the employees 
of the Great Southern Lumber Company,” 
who “attempted to arrest the Negro.” 

As early as June, 1919, the president of the 
New Orleans branch of the National Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Colored People 
had reported the expulsion from Bogalusa 
of respectable colored men, “‘among them a 
doctor owning about fifty thousand dollars’ 
worth of property” because they had refused 
to advise colored people against joining the 
unions. The committee which visited the col- 
ored citizens gave them twenty minutes, or an 
hour, or six hours, to leave town, according 
to their circumstances. One of the Negroes, 
sixty-five years old, who was beaten on the 
night before the hunt for the Negro organizer 
which cost four white men’s lives, wrote of 


his experiences to The New Orleans Vindicator: 
199 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


“T moved to Bogalusa in 1907. I worked 
off and on for the Great Southern Lumber 
Company up to the time the labor trouble 
began. In November I met a member of 
the so-called ‘“strong-armed squad’ and he 
said to me, ‘Why don’t you go back to work?’ 
I said that the company demanded that [ 
tear up my union card and that was the 
only condition under which we would be 
allowed to go back to work—renounce our 
union membership and get back into the old 
rut where we had always been until just a 
short while ago when we joined the union. 
He replied to me, ‘Well, you had _ better 
get out of this town!’ I thought little of 
the remark at first because I have always 
tried to live peaceable with everybody and, 
secondly, I could not think that any civilized 
man in this day and time could think of 
killing a man because he tried, in a legal 
way, to get all that he could for his labor. 
This man proved to be one of the gang that 
came to my home Friday night and dragged 
me out and beat me. I know him well 
and he knows me.” 

Officers of local labor unions telegraphed 
to the United States Attorney-General, to 


the president of the American Federation of 
200 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


Labor, and to the Secretary of War, recalling 
their repeated requests for investigation of 
conditions in Bogalusa. Whatever the out- 
come of investigation or neglect, one fact of 
major significance for race relations was 
uncovered there. As Miss Ovington said in 
comment, “Not since the days of Populism 
has the South seen so dramatic an espousal 
by the white man of the black man’s cause.”’ 
It indicated the beginning of the end of the 
exploitation of both white and colored workers 
which had been accomplished by pitting their 
groups against one another and by fanning 
the animosities that left them hostile.! 

The supremacy is menaced of lumber 
companies which exploit black labor merci- 
lessly by preventing organization. White 
men, too poor to pay a poll tax, ignorant, and 
disfranchised, have found a key to such 
industrial conditions as those in Bogalusa. 
When they join forces with colored labor 
a political, as well as an industrial system 
that is founded in misinformation, oppres- 
sion, artificially fostered hatreds and brutali- 
ties, begins to totter. As the color line is 
stretched and becomes a matter of national 

1 Further information on the Bogalusa episode is contained in 


Appendix. 
201 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


concern, it becomes more and more evident 
that colored labor cannot be treated as 
though it were a monstrosity or a rare speci- 
men. Too much evidence is at hand which 
demonstrates that not only have colored 
men done their work as well as white, often 
increasing output in factories manned pre- 
viously by white men, but also have worked 
in amity, without friction, among white 
workers. The elaborate plans made by the 
steel companies to obtain and to keep Negro 
labor tell their own story. The Urban League 
of Pittsburgh found that the Negro laborer 
“ean do anything the white worker can do.” 
If some negroes are unsteady, on the other 
hand there are “hundreds and hundreds and 
even thousands of Negroes who have not lost 
a single day and are counted upon by concerns 
as their most dependable men.” A letter 
from the head of a Negro welfare association 
of Cleveland says of a questionnaire sent to 
employers: “‘The employers’ opinion as to 
efficiency has been very satisfactory. This is 
determined by the answers contained in a 
questionnaire sent out to one hundred and 
fifty industrial plants. Most of these answers 
have been returned, but the data have not been 


compiled. Only two or three, so far, have 
202 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


expressed dissatisfaction, and even their criti- 
cism is qualified.’ A letter from an officer 
of the Department of Labor states: “‘Em- 
ployers of labor have informed me that the 
Negro is not less efficient than the native 
white and is more efficient than certain types 
of foreigners. The charge of inefficiency 
usually comes from locations where ‘camps’ 
obtain or where housing facilities are inade- 
quate. It is unreasonable to expect 100-per- 
cent. efficiency from a man who is obliged 
to sleep in a public park, in a sub-basement, 
in a bathtub, or in a_ ten-by-twelve-foot 
room with half a dozen other men.” 

Dr. George E. Haynes, Director of Negro 
Economics of the Department of Labor, 
in a letter of November 12, 1919, quoted 
the following as “characteristic opinions”’ of 
employers. From an automobile firm in 
Detroit, Michigan: ““We have in our employ 
some twelve hundred to fifteen hundred 
Negroes. They are giving very satisfactory 
services.” 

Another such firm reported the reorganiza- 
tion of one department whose work had been 
done “‘by seventy white men of many na- 
tionalities, and by working overtime these 


seventy men were producing an average 
203 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


of eighteen chassis per day. The work in- 
cluded riveting, drilling, filing, and pressing in 
hangers and bushings. Within six weeks after 
this department had been reorganized, using 
Negro workers exclusively, fifty men were 
producing from forty to fifty assemblies per 
day, and overtime work had been greatly re- 
duced. This showed a clear increase in effi- 
ciency of over 300 per cent.” 

A news paragraph from the Department of 
Labor, published early in February, reported 
a decrease in the accident rate as Negro 
molders and helpers supplanted other labor 
in the foundries of Indianapolis: “Another 
very interesting fact is that both union and 
non-union white molders have worked with 
these Negroes in most friendly co-operation. 
... The general testimony of the foundry 
owners and managers in a number of foundries 
is that the Negro molders have given entire 
satisfaction under the strenuous war pace, 
and that the Negro is making good. Some 
managers say that the conditions that exist 
between workers depend upon the wndividual 
and not wpon the race.” ! 

It is not necessary to draw from the evi- 
dence presented any conclusions other than 


1Ttalics mine. 
204 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


those written upon the face of the facts— 
namely, that the Negro has enormously 
enlarged his sphere of opportunity in industry 
by doing satisfactorily the work allotted to 
him; that he has worked with white men 
amicably; and that the future of the Ameri- 
can labor movement will be involved to some 
extent in the position which the Negro work- 
man is given or takes. In the existing state 
of industrial organization, the Negro’s capa- 
bilities, as they may be limited or determined 
by racial inheritance, play a small part. 
With few exceptions industries are not so 
thoroughly organized that slight individual 
and psychological differences make themselves 
felt in large-scale production. Meanwhile 
the test of practice has been applied. The 
results have shown industrial corporations 
eager to employ and to retain Negro labor. 
That is a fact which, regardless of racial prej- 
udice, actual or alleged racial “‘inferiority,”’ 
it is necessary for any student of labor cur- 
rents to take into account. 

It was not uncommon during the steel 
strike of 1919 for such captions to be published 
as the following in The New York Tribune 
of September 24th, “Race War Feared at 


Gary Plants—Negroes Imported from Bir- 
205 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


mingham Stir Anger of the Strikers.” The 
caption was followed by a first paragraph 
announcing that “threats of a race war be- 
tween foreign-born strikers and Negro steel 
men remaining at work drew interest,” as 
more mills were closed. What was described 
as an “undercurrent of hostility” was ex- 
plained by the assertion that “three hundred 
Negroes, recently imported from Birming- 
ham, Alabama, refused to heed the call of the 
union and remained at work, keeping fires 
under the furnaces of the Indiana Steel 
Company.” “It is unfortunate,” says Mr. 
Epstein, “that often a race issue is made of a 
purely labor question.” 

It has been charged that at various times 
deliberate attempts have been made to foment 
racial antagonisms, not only against Negroes, 
but against and among “‘foreigners”’ in order 
to divide labor and make organization diff- 
cult, if not impossible. On November 2d a 
despatch attributed to the Universal News 
Service quoted “State- Attorney Hoyne” as 
saying that steel-mills of the Chicago dis- 
trict had employed a detective agency to 
foment violence during the strike. Complaint 
against the agency had been made by Edward 
N. Nockels, secretary of the Chicago Federa- 

206 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


tion of Labor, who “charged the concern 
employed scores of men throughout the steel 
district, who were instructed to create race 
hatred between Negroes and whites and 
urge workmen to violence.’ Mr. Hoyne 
was quoted as having said: “There is no 
doubt in my mind that the Service, 
through its operatives, was engaged in stirring 
up riots. Its operatives destroyed or advo- 
cated the destruction of property, aroused 
antagonism between different groups of 
strikers, and employed sluggers. The agency 
admitted that it was employed by the Steel 
and Tube Company of America, but they 
deny knowledge of the methods of the 
concern.” 

Much of the mistaken “ Americanization”’ 
propaganda conducted by influential news- 
papers endeavored to create an issue of 
industrial “loyalty”? as between American- 
born workers who stood by their companies 
and foreign-born workers who joined unions 
and struck. Not infrequently, in the course 
of such realignments, it was discovered that 
the Negro was a real “American” and the 
foreign-born white man was the alien. In 
this play of industrial forces the status of 


racial groups was relative to purely economic 
207 





THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


motives. In the South it is the Negro who 
is alien. In the North the Negro is often 
“American,” as opposed to those who would 
be considered his superiors south of the Ohio 
River. The dangers are obvious of such 
irresponsible industrial leadership as seeks to 
control labor through hatreds and ignorance. 
These dangers would be obvious, even if 
there were not Atlanta, East St. Louis, and 
Chicago to stand as dramatic warnings. 
That the Negro has come to realize how 
closely his status is bound up with equality 
of industrial opportunity there is abundant 
testimony. Mr. Carl Sandburg points out 
that “it is economic equality that gets the 
emphasis in the speeches and the writings 
of the colored people themselves.’ And he 
lists the new doors of opportunity which 
were opened to Negroes in Chicago in the 
two years preceding the Chicago riots of 
1919, among them foundries, tanneries, freight- 
warehouses, automobile-repair shops, a mat- 
tress-factory, gas-meter inspectorships. The 
Negro has been engaged in conquering and 
making his own new industrial fields. That 
development was bound to come in time. 
It was undoubtedly accelerated by the World 


War, as much as fifty years, in the estimation 
208 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


of a number of observers. One fruit of the 
acceleration was acute conflict which came 
of the same sort of maladjustment that at- 
tended the influx of immigrant labor from 
abroad. What fostered the violence and the 
industrial riots of 1919, some of them errone- 
ously called race riots, was the unduly sensi- 
tive, in fact, morbid, state of the public 
mind with regard to color. It rests very 
largely with labor, white and colored, whether 
the divisions that have caused havoe are to 
be perpetuated and made irreconcilable. The 
broadest path toward harmonization of racial 
differences in the future lies in labor organi- 
zation. As soon as a community of interest 
is recognized between white and colored 
workers, as it was recognized in the heart of 
the South, in Bogalusa, Louisiana, race prej- 
udice fades into its proper place as a bogy, 
a set of ungoverned and unanalyzed emotions, 
which can be stimulated to the detriment 
of the people who harbor those emotions. 
In more than one place the color line is 
being swept irresistibly out of labor organi- 
zations. 

“We all know there are unions in the 
American Federation of Labor that have their 


feet in the twentieth century and their heads 
14 209 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


3 


in the sixteenth century,” said the secretary 
of the Stockyards Labor Council of Chicago, 
according to Mr. Sandburg. The same in- 
vestigator quotes one of the officers of a pack- 
ing company as saying: “In the yards it is 
not a race question at all. It is a labor- 
union question!” The question is still de- 
bated whether the Negro is or is not a “‘good 
union man.” In fact, the Negro was and has 
been shown to be systematically discriminated 
against, until the industrial weight of his 
numbers and his competence made _ itself 
felt. If many Negroes are not now good 
union men, it is because they have never, 
despite their interest and their desire, been 
given opportunity to have an effective part in 
the American labor movement. 


1 
Housing 


What was mainly a labor and an industrial 
readjustment on a large scale during and 
immediately following the World War was 
complicated by the absence of plans for 
decently housing the immigrants. As Mr. 


Epstein has shown of Pittsburgh, the bulk 
210 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


of Negro laborers wno came North fell 
between the ages of eighteen and _ forty. 
Rents were abnormally high and the large 
number of unmarried men lived under un- 
sanitary conditions. Thus, of 390 Negroes 
Mr. Epstein examined, 57 lived in rooms 
housing more than 6 people and 98 in rooms 
occupied by 4 persons. Of conditions in 
rooming -houses, Mr. Epstein noted that 
13 per cent. of the men without families, 
who came under his observation, slept three 
or more in one bed, and “in many instances, 
houses in which these rooms are located 
are dilapidated dwellings with the paper 
torn off, the plaster sagging from the naked 
lath, the windows broken, the ceiling low 
and damp, and the whole room dark, stuffy, 
and unsanitary.” Some of the rooms “with 
more than six people sleeping in them at 
one time have practically no openings for 
either hight or air.’ In Chicago, as elsewhere, 
the planlessness with which Northern indus- 
trial cities met the Southern Negro occasioned 
overcrowding, and an overflow of the Negro 
residence district. Branded as an alien and 
an interloper, the Negro was also made to 
seem an invader of white residence districts. 


“Most of the Negro workmen,” said The 


211 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


New York Tribune in its despatch warning 
of industrial conflict about Gary, “‘live in a 
section of the city adjoining that of the 
foreign element, and bitterness has been mani- 
fested since the first call of the walkout.” 
Mr. Sandburg listed housing as the first 
of three “‘radical and active factors,” in any 
American city where the racial situation 
was critical. 

Antagonism against competing labor ts eas- 
ily made to accompany hatred of alien neigh- 
bors. In Chicago the influx of Negroes was 
accompanied by aggressive propaganda in 
the newspapers and in meetings, many of 
them held secretly, urging white men to 
stand firm against the “invasion” of their 
districts by Negroes. Undoubtedly it was 
to the advantage of certain real-estate specu- 
lators to create a state of mind bordering 
on panic among property-owners. Property 
was sold at abnormally low prices and im- 
mediately thereafter rose in value. Of the 
so-called Black Belt in Chicago, Mr. Sand- 
burg wrote: “There seem to be certain 
preposterous axioms of real-estate exchange 
governing this district and no others in 
Chicago. These axioms might be stated 


thus: 
212 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


““(1) Sell at a loss and the rent goes higher, 
and | 

“(2) The larger the number of colored 
persons ready to pay higher rentals the lower 
the realty values slump.” 

In this peculiar game the Negro was as 
much a victim as he was in the contest of 
capital and labor. Bombing of Negro resi- 
dences during the early months of 1919 was 
variously attributed to “‘race feeling’ and 
to the conflict of rival real-estate interests. 
The question of politics was also raised 
when the bombings were referred to as part 
of a campaign to terrorize the Negro out 
of settlng and becoming a political power in 
the Third as well as in the Second Ward. 
In at least one case a bomb was exploded, 
not in the Negro district, but in front of the 
house of a white real-estate owner who had 
been warned to get rid of Negro tenants on 
his property. 

The industrial implications of inadequate 
housing for Negro migrants were emphasized 
in various ways. For the congestion and 
consequent overflow of the Chicago Negro- 
residence district the packing and _ other 
companies which had imported colored work- 


ers were partly responsible. Yet, although 
213 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


the dangerous effects of the encroachment 
of colored residents upon white districts were 
repeatedly pointed out, no intelligent effort 
was made to provide homes for the colored 
people. To the bitterness felt and expressed 
by union men of Chicago was added the 
panic of property-owners. ‘The profiteering 
meat-packers of Chicago,” said John Fitz- 
patrick of the Chicago Federation of Labor, 
“fare responsible for the race riots which have 
disgraced our city. It is the outcome of their 
deliberate attempt to disrupt the union-labor 
movement in the yards” (Chicago Tribune, 
August 18, 1919). 

Yet these riots were almost universally 
spoken of in connection with housing. As 
early as July 13th, weeks before the out- 
break occurred, The Chicago Herald-Examiner 
published an account of a suit for damages 
brought against a property-owners’ associa- 
tion by a Negro whose property had been 
bombed. Four “real-estate men” connected 
with the Kenwood Property Owners’ Asso- 
ciation were made defendants of the suit and 
the plaintiff’s attorney asserted that “the 
men who placed the bomb are in the employ 
of real-estate men to frighten Negroes out of 


Kenwood.” As late as October, 1919, the 
214 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


anti-Negro propaganda found expression in a 
mass-meeting of two thousand persons under 
the auspices of the Kenwood and Hyde 
Park Property Owners’ Association. The 
treasurer of the organization “precipitated 
the climax of the meeting when he requested 
all who would work to free the district of 
Negroes to stand up. With one accord, 
every man and woman arose with shouts” 
(Chicago Herald-Examiner, October 21, 1919). 
The threatened ‘Negro influx” in the white 
residential district about Michigan, Calumet, 
and Vincent Avenues and Grand Boulevard 
assumed a different complexion when a Negro 
lawyer, representing a committee of Negro 
residents, explained that colored people would 
willingly enough leave white districts “if suit- 
able quarters and reasonable rentals could 
be provided any place in the city where the 
Negroes could be to themselves” (Chicago 
Herald-Examiner, October 25, 1919). “The 
interchange of ideas took place frankly and in a 
friendly spirit,” at this meeting, and, when the 
meeting adjourned, “a vote of thanks was ten- 
dered the Negroes for their spirit of fairness 
and open-mindedness” (Chicago Tribune, Oc- 
tober 25, 1919). 


J. Gray Lucas, representing the colored 
215 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


residents, intelligently and simply formulated 
the problems before the meeting. “The 
white man controls capital and regulates 
values,” he was quoted as saying. “If your 
property values go down, it is your own 
fault. If a Negro family moves into a white 
block, every one else sacrifices his interests 
in a panic and runs away. You ask what you 
ean do for the colored man. You must 
offer him a better place to live at a more 
reasonable price than he is now paying. 
Then he will be glad to move. He does not 
invade the white district because he wants 
white neighbors, but simply because he wants 
the most comfort and the best home he can 
get for his money.”’ 

The trouble which had originated in Chi- 
eago’s industrial laissez-faire, which had been 
inflated to a grotesque menace by real-estate 
speculators, by honest but stupid panic due 
to the press, by political greed, and a small 
residue of malevolence, seemed here to have 
been brought into some sort of light. For 
property-owners, as for labor -unionists, it 
was made glaringly evident that color and 
the habits of thought which come from 
emphasizing color distinctions must be sub- 


ordinated to the need for joint consideration 
216 


THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY 


of common difficulties. For white folk to 
talk of segregating the Negro is to invite 
disabilities and difficulties for themselves 
in American cities. Even such an influx of 
Negro immigrants as war industry brought to 
Chicago could be considered and dealt with, 
not in the fashion of big stick and repression, 
but in open meeting and frank discussion. 
The conclusion which has been pointed for 
white labor is no less plain than that which 
stared Chicago’s property-owners in the face. 

Not only the Negro’s position in industry, 
but the orderliness with which new forms 
of society are devised, depends upon the 
Negro’s sense of his real share in the building 
of American civilization. He has been by 
force of circumstance inducted into the techni- | 
cal and social complexities of industrialism. 
He may be made a valuable source of power 
and inventiveness, or he may be driven to 
the self-defense which means destruction of 
the society which provokes it. The housing 
problem occasioned by the immigration to 
Northern cities was incidental to a rapid 
change. It brought the residents of cities 
up to a set of problems that labor-unionists 
and industrialists had already begun to formu- 


late for themselves. 
217 


VII 
THE AMERICAN CONGO 


[‘ will be many years, perhaps, before the 

story of the “freed” Negro in the Southern 
states 1s written down intelligibly, trimmed 
of the animosity which imputes to Northern 
commercialism or to Southern aristocracy 
an undue burden of responsibility for oppres- 
sion. In a time when race questions are 
being furiously agitated, when a northward 
migration is in progress and the _ political 
scene vibrates to the mention or thought of 
color, interpretation becomes hazardous. It 
is possible, however, to sift the miscellany 
that masquerades as news and to begin clear- 
ing the sadly blotted and obscured record. 
A detached mind, unacquainted with _his- 
torical, economic, or emotional determinants, 
entering upon such a task, and taking Ameri- 
can professions at something like face value, 
could not fail to find conditions prevailing 


in 1920 so sadly at variance with current 
218 


nti 2 i a a 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


conceptions of Americanism or civilization 
as almost to deprive the words of their mean- 
ing. Innumerable brutalities have been set 
down in glaring letters against white and 
black men. But it is the white men who 
avowedly dominate; their press creates the 
popular sentiment which sets the cultural 
tone of the South; it is the white man’s 
courts and the white man’s juries which 
administer law; it is, finally, white soldiers 
whose bullets and bayonets are called for to 
preserve or to restore order. In the cir- 
cumstances, one step toward setting the 
record clear would consist in an examination 
of the white man’s records and _ processes 
for signs of chronic racial maladjustment; 
for such maladjustment can be shown endemic 
in many of the Southern states, and not only 
expresses itself dramatically and tragically, 
but occasions the diffusion of race problems 
over the entire land. However true it is 
that floods or the plague of boll weevils in 
Southwestern cotton-fields starved out Ne- 
groes, it was still the Negro’s position in 
society, the treatment accorded him as pro- 
ducer and as human being which impelled 
him to go North. “The treatment accorded 


the Negro always stood second, when not 
219 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


first, among the reasons given by Negroes 
for leaving the South,” wrote Mr. W. T. B. 
Williams.! “I talked with all classes of 
colored people from Virginia to Louisiana— 
farm-hands, tenants, farmers, hack-drivers, 
porters, mechanics, barbers, merchants, in- 
surance men, teachers, heads of schools, 
ministers, druggists, physicians, and lawyers— 
and in every instance the matter of treatment 
came to the front voluntarily. This is the 
all-absorbing, burning question among Ne- 
groes. For years no group of the thoughtful, 
intelligent class of Negroes, at any rate, 
have met for any purpose without finally 
drifting into some discussion of their treat- 
ment at the hands of white people.” It would 
be possible to draw up an indictment of that 
treatment by emphasizing isolated brutali- 
ties, such as the burning at stake of fourteen 
colored men in the United States in the year 
1919. The details of many lynchings have 
seared the pages on which they were described 
and could again be made to evoke a thrill 
of horror from readers. But the record de- 
mands not stories of horror alone; it requires 
some exposition of motive. Violence is merely 


1 Report of W. T. B. Williams, Negro Migration in 1916-17. U.S. 
Department of Labor. 


220 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


a means to an end, even if that end be the 
glutting of passion. 

In any civilization where questions of per- 
sonal freedom were so closely bound to eco- 
nomic considerations as in the _ pre-Civil 
War South, those economic considerations 
were bound to exert influence even when 
apparently the connection had been broken. 
The endeavor to keep the Negro in economic 
subjection through the enactment of the 
“Black Codes” is now an old story. Yet 
old stories repeat themselves. ‘‘The report 
of the Attorney-General for the year 1907 
contains a list of eighty-three complaints 
of peonage pending in the Department of 
Justice,’ says Mr. Lafayette M. Hershaw.'! 
It is worth while to quote Justice Brewer’s 
definition of peonage as it is given by Mr. 
Hershaw: “It may be defined as a status 
or condition of compulsory service based 
upon the indebtedness of the peon to the 
master. The basal fact is indebtedness. One 
fact exists universally, all were indebted 
to their masters. This was the cord by 
which they seemed bound to their masters’ ser- 
vice.” ‘‘Therefore,’ comments Mr. Hershaw, 

1 Lafayette M. Hershaw, Peonage. Occasional Papers, No. 15. 


The American Negro Academy. Washington, 1915. 
221 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


‘‘wherever we have compulsory service for | 
debt we have peonage, it matters not by 
what method the result is obtained.” The 
definition is pertinent in view of a letter pub- 
lished in The Memphis Commercial Appeal, 
early in 1919, and signed “‘A Southerner.”’ 

“In certain parts of the South,” says the 
writer, ‘“‘men who consider themselves men 
of honor and would exact a bloody expiation 
of one who would characterize them as com- 
mon cheats do not hesitate to boast that they 
rob the Negroes by purchasing their cotton 
at prices that are larcenous, by selling goods 
to them at extortionate figures, and even by 
padding their accounts with a view of keeping 
them always in debt. A protest from a Negro 
against tactics of this kind is met with a 
threat of force. Justice at the hands of a 
white jury in sections where this practice 
obtains is inconceivable. Even an attempt to 
carry the matter into the courts is usually 
provocative of violence.” 

“Apparently, in order to secure his labor,” 
says Mr. W. T. B. Williams of the farm 
tenant in Mississippi, “the landlord often 
will not settle for the year’s work till late 
in the spring when the next crop has been 


‘pitched.? The Negro is then bound hand 
222 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


and foot and must accept the landlord’s 
terms. It usually means that it is impossible 
for him to get out of the landlord’s clutches, 
no matter how he is being treated. In many 
cases the Negro does not dare ask for a 
settlement.’ And later Mr. Williams re- 
marks: ‘“‘The beating of farm-hands on the 
large plantations in the lower South is so 
common that many colored people look upon 
every great plantation as a peon camp; 
and in sawmills and other public works it 
is not at all unusual for bosses to knock 
Negroes around with pieces of lumber or 
anything else that happens to come handy.” 
A condition of servitude and oppression is 
testified to by a number of observers. Against 
this dark background a lurid illumination 
was thrown from the riots which occurred 
in Phillips County, Arkansas, in October of 
1919. As most phases of the strained re- 
lations between the races have eventuated 
in violence, so the exploitation of Negro 
farm tenants was bound to produce it. 
Following closely upon the sacking of the 
court-house in Omaha, Nebraska, with the 
barely unsuccessful attempt to hang the 
mayor, the affray which occurred on Septem- 


ber 30th in a small Arkansas town and pro- 
223 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


voked conflict between white and colored 
men did not at first attract much attention. 
In the ensuing days, to October 6th, more 
and more alarming reports shocked the coun- 
try into wakefulness. What was first de- 
scribed as a race riot became a “‘revolt,”’ 
an “uprising,” a plot by Negroes to “mas- 
sacre all whites.” “‘All Whites Marked for 
Slaughter,” announced a scarehead of The 
New York Evening Telegram on October 6th. 
The New York Times followed suit with 
“Planned Massacre of Whites To-day.” The 
New York Tribune announced “Negro Plot 
to Massacre All Whites Found.” The Memphis 
Commercial Appeal found that “ Negroes Had 
Planned General Slaughter” and The Arkansas 
Gazette had blazoned the assertions that 
“Vicious Blacks Were Planning Great Up- 
rising—All Evidence Points to Carefully 
Planned Rebellion.’’ Rebellion, revolt, insur- 
rection, massacre, plot, night-riding, “‘ Negro 
Paul Reveres’—every word that might sug- 
gest the clandestine, the violent, the menac- 
ing, was lavishly used to describe conditions 
in Arkansas. Throughout the United States 
the impression was created by Associated 
Press despatches and by numerous corre- 


spondents that Negroes had organized against 
224 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


white men and had planned to murder and to 
rob. 

A town called Hoop Spur, but a few miles 
from the Mississippi River and some twenty- 
five miles southwest of Helena, was the scene 
of the initial outbreak. A _ shooting affray 
had taken place here between Negroes as- 
sembled in a country church and two white 
men with a Negro prisoner in an automobile 
outside. The white men, W. A. Adkins, a 
“special agent’ for the Missouri Pacific 
Railroad, and Charles Pratt, deputy sheriff, 
were said to be on their way to arrest a 
“white bootlegger’’ or whisky-smuggler,: who 
had been causing trouble in Elaine. The 
white men, it was asserted, “had trouble 
with their car”? and stopped just outside the 
Negro church (Arkansas Gazette, October 4th). 
There would seem to be a strong element of 
coincidence in the automobile trouble which 
would halt a white deputy sheriff on a country 
road just outside a church in which a meeting 
of Negroes was being held. From that point 
accounts differ. The white press asserted 
that the meeting had been maturing its con- 
spiracy plot, and suspected that their plans 
had been discovered. The Negroes, it was 


asserted, “opened fire, killing Adkins, and 
15 205 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


severely wounding Pratt.’”’ A aespatch from 
Helena, of October 5th, credited to the 
Associated Press, spoke of the widespread 
uprising which had been planned, and asserted 
that at Hoop Spur “there were one hundred 
armed Negroes in the church at the scene 
of the shooting,’ of whom some were said to 
be women “carrying automatic revolvers 
in their stockings” (Arkansas Gazette, Octo- 
ber 6, 1919). Fifty thousand rounds of 
ammunition were announced as having been 
found in the Branch Normal School, a colored 
institution of Pine Bluff. A subsequent de- 
spatch on October 6th,inconspicuously printed, 
explained that the ammunition had been 
sent there by the government for the training 
of student officers during the World War, 
and the store had been found intact. But 
the initial report of the finding of the ammuni- 
tion, the Associated Press reported, had led 
‘authorities here to believe the contemplated 
uprising was of more than a local nature, 
possibly planned for the entire South” (Arkan- 
sas Gazette, October 6th). 

Panic rumor spread. The country-side was 
roused. The Governor of Arkansas called 
for United States troops. White planters 


and their friends organized themselves into 
226 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


posses and a hunt for “niggers” began. 
Fighting took place in Elaine, next to Hoop 
Spur, where armed white men maintained 
headquarters. No accurate record was kept 
of the number of colored men killed, “but 
according to one member of the posse from 
Helena, who came in from the scene of the 
fighting late yesterday, “there are plenty of 
them’”’ (Arkansas Democrat, October 2, 1919). 
**Possemen from various towns, after numer- 
ous clashes with Negroes yesterday afternoon, 
had gathered at Elaine to spend the night,” 
said the same newspaper; furthermore “the 
white women in the town were concentrated 
in the center of the town and all white men 
stayed on guard throughout the night.” 
“Wild rumors,” reported The Arkansas Ga- 
zette of October 8th, “were abroad in Helena 
last night to the effect that Negroes were 
armed ‘somewhere’ and would attack the 
outlying homes during the night. Investiga- 
tion revealed no foundation for these rumors.”’ 
Harry Cherry, correspondent of The Memphis 
Press, reported on October 4th that he had 
followed “‘posses and soldiers into the cane- 
brakes in search of Negro desperadoes who 
were defying the officers.”” He reported hav- 


ing seen dead bodies lying in the road not 
227 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


far from Helena, and noted further, “En- 
raged citizens fired at the bodies of the dead 
Negroes as they road [rode] out of Helena 
toward Elaine....’ “Every one of the five 
hundred troops who went to Elaine appeared 
anxious to get into battle with the blacks,” 
reported a correspondent of an Arkansas 
newspaper of October 6th. A despatch to 
The Arkansas Gazette of October 3d, headed 
“Lynching Discussed?” reported a meeting 
of Helena business men at the court-house, 
from which newspaper correspondents had 
been excluded. “It was said that a probable 
or threatened lynching was discussed.” 
Under the circumstances it seems a euphem- 
ism to compliment the white people of Phil- 
lips County, Arkansas, on the absence of 
race hatred among them and to speak of 
their calm behavior and willingness to let 
the law take its course, as did Mr. Jack C. 
Wilson, executive secretary of the Mississippi 
Welfare League, who had come to see how 
race relations were administered in Arkansas. 
Meanwhile, white men were being armed 
throughout the county and Negroes disarmed. 
“More than three hundred special deputy, 
sheriffs [white] were sworn in by Sheriff 


Kitchens and sent to the scene of the insur- 
298 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


rection” (Arkansas Gazette, October 6th). 
Canebrakes in the low-lying lands were 
searched for Negroes who had fled, and 
soldiers “‘were instructed to permit any black 
to surrender, but to shoot to kill if they showed 
any inclination to fight” (Arkansas Gazette, 
October 6th). Furthermore, all Negroes in 
the vicinity of the trouble were required to 
show passes signed by army officers, and 
these passes “‘were issued only when the 
Negroes’ employers would vouch for them.” 
This fact assumes extraordinary significance 
when it is known that the relations of em- 
ployer and farm-hand, of landlord and tenant 
were at the root of the Phillips County 
‘““massacre.” For it meant that the employ- 
ers, or landlords, parties to the trouble, were 
given what under the circumstances was 
the enormous power of sanctioning or declin- 
ing to sanction the free movement of their 
employees or tenants. 

White Mississippians took the opportunity 
for improving their methods, to come to 
Arkansas for study. “‘County officials and 
other representatives from various towns and 
counties in Mississippi, including Friar’s Point 
on the river, Clarksdale, Cleveland, Tunica, 


Greenwoced, Sumner, and Charleston, were 
229 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


here to-day conferring with the Committee 
of Seven as to the methods employed in 
dealing with the troubles in this county” 
(Arkansas Gazette, October 8th). It will be 
seen that the conditions which prevailed in 
Phillips County, Arkansas, before the dis- 
turbance must have had points of similarity 
to the state of affairs in other parts of the 
South, notably Mississippi. What was the 
explanation of those conditions as it was 
given by white men? 

A committee of seven white men, apparently 
self-constituted, but “authorized” by the 
Governor of Arkansas to investigate the 
disorders in Phillips County, published a 
statement through one of its members, E. M. 
Allen, president of the Helena Business Men’s 
League and “owner of considerable property” 
(Chicago Tribune, October 7th). He asserted 
that the trouble in Phillips County had been 
not a race riot, but “a deliberately planned 
insurrection of the Negroes against the whites, 
directed by an organization known as the 
Progressive Farmers’ and Household Union 
of America, established for the sole purpose of 
banding Negroes together for the killing of 
white people.” Especial emphasis is to be 


given this statement, coming as it does from 
230 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


3 


a “leading business man” and an “owner of 
considerable property.” Formation of the 
Farmers’ Union Mr. Allen attributed to Robert 
L. Hill, “‘a Negro, twenty-six years of age, 
of Winchester, Arkansas, who saw in it an 
opportunity of ‘easy money.” Hill first 
organized a lodge at Ratio ‘“‘because his 
mother happened to be living there.” He 
was charged by Mr. Allen with representing 
himself to the Negroes as an agent of the 
federal government deputized to call the 
organization into existence. ‘“‘The slogan of 
the organization is,‘ We battle for our rights!’”’ 
Hill was charged with extorting membership 
fees from ignorant and credulous colored 
people. The Chicago Tribune's caption de- 
scribed the Phillips County riots as “The 
Harebrained Plot of a Negro Wallingford— 
Amazing Story of Scheme to Slay All Whites 
of Arkansas Bared.” At least two white 
men were said to have assisted in the organi- 
zation of the Progressive Farmers’ and House- 
hold Union of America, one of them being 
O. S. Bratton of Little Rock, Arkansas, who, 
according to The Arkansas Democrat of Octo- 
ber 3d, was “charged with murder in con- 
nection with the death of W. A. Adkins,” 


shot outside the Negro church at Hoop Spur. 
231 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


In an article in The Memphis Press of October 
4th O. S. Bratton was described as “a Little 
Rock lawyer who had been prominent in 
Republican politics,” and he was said to be 
“charged with being implicated in the murder 
of O. R. Lilly, real-estate man, and also with 
incensing the blacks.’’ “In a calmer mood,” 
reported The Arkansas Gazette of the same 
day, “‘the feeling of bitterness against Brat- 
ton.seemed to have somewhat diminished, and 
it is said that the nature of the documents 
found in his possession had no direct bearing 
on the action of the insurgent Negroes, 
although they might have had some influence 
in that direction.’ Nevertheless, in the first 
heat of panic, O. S. Bratton had been charged 
with murder and “brought to Helena in 
chains” (Arkansas Democrat, October 2d). 
‘Feeling against him is bitter, but there has 
so far been no indication of summary action.” 
The charge of murder and incitement to riot 
evaporated when the grand jury of Phillips 
County indicted O. S. Bratton on a charge 
of barratry or inciting unnecessary lawsuits, 
and this dangerous agitator, murderer, and 
insurrectionist was released on his own recog- 
nizances. 


The case as it was stated against the 
232 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


Negroes of Phillips County has been given 
in some detail. They were imsurrectionists 
and had planned a massacre of white men. 
Their “Progressive Farmers’ and Household 
Union of America”? was formed for that sole 
purpose by a Negro named. Hill, who had 
misrepresented his position and hoped to 
profit from their credulity. The plans of the 
organization as they were represented in the 
white press varied from the slaughter of 
every white man in the state of Arkansas 
to the taking over of the land in Phillips 
County. White men were implicated and 
were accused of having assisted the Negroes 
In organizing. One of the white men was 
brought to Helena in chains, charged unoff- 
cially with murder, but subsequently released 
under a perfunctory indictment for barratry. 
Meanwhile, at least five white men and 
twenty-five Negroes had been killed in the 
turmoil. In the case against the Negroes 
as 1t appeared in the white press, there were, 
however, certain discrepancies. Thus, of the 
meeting of Negroes in the church at Hoop 
spur, The Memphis Commercial Appeal of 
October 3d remarked that “the Negroes 
were meeting in this church Tuesday night, 


as 1s their custom. ...° Despite the asser- 
233 ; 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


tion of E. M. Allen that the Farmers’ Union 
had been established “for the sole purpose of 
banding Negroes together for the killing of 
white people,”’ certain other purposes appeared 
in the news despatches. ‘“‘ With October 6th 
set as the day for the uprising,” reported 
The New York Globe of October 6th, “‘ Negro 
prisoners are said to have confessed, each 
member of the organization at specified places 
was to take a bale of cotton by that date to 
certain prominent landowners, plantation- 
managers, and merchants and demand a 
settlement”’—in other words, a statement of 
account. It will be recalled that denial of 
‘settlements,’ or statements of account, was 
one of the means referred to by which Negroes 
were kept in debt and in a condition closely 
approximating peonage. Further light is 
thrown on the situation by a statement attrib- 
uted to U. S. Bratton, father of the man 
who was brought to Helena in chains (Mem- 
phis Commercial Appeal, October 3d). U.S. 
Bratton had held a number of federal offices, 
including that of Assistant United States 
Attorney and postmaster. Mr. Bratton said 
a Negro from Ratio, Arkansas, had asked 
Mr. Bratton’s law firm to represent him 


and a number of other Negroes. It was 
234 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


arranged that the son, O. S. Bratton, was to 
meet the Negroes “and to get the facts from 
all of them as they claimed them to be, after 
which we would take the matter up with 
the manager and see if some amicable settle- 
ment could not be made.’ He found that 
the Negroes were claiming “‘that it had been 
impossible for them to obtain itemized state- 
ments of accounts, or in fact to obtain 
statements at all, and that the manager was 
preparing to ship their cotton (they being 
share-croppers and having a_half-interest 
therein) off without settling with them or allow- 
ing| them. to sell their half of the crop and 
pay up their accounts. As we were informed, 
there were some sixty-five or seventy of these 
share-croppers who desired us to represent 
them. If it’s a crime to represent people 
in an effort to make honest settlements, 
then he [O. S. Bratton] has committed a crime. 
If this is a crime in a country where we have 
been spending our money and the lives of our 
boys to make the country safe for democracy, 
we do not understand what the word means. 
The above are facts which a full investigation 
will show beyond the peradventure of a 
doubt, and we court the fullest investigation.” 


U. S. Bratton being a reputable lawyer of 
235 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Arkansas, albeit a Republican in Democratic 
territory, his statement strengthens the sup- 
position that the Negroes of Ratio, at least, 
had some other motive than massacring their 
white landlords. Despite the confident as- 
sertions of Arkansas white men as to the 
purposes of the Progressive Farmers’ and 
Household Union of America, published quota- 
tions from the literature of the organization 
indicated none but peaceable intentions. Thus 
the object of the union was to be “‘to advance 
the interests of the Negro, mentally and intel- 
lectually, and to make him a better citizen 
and a better farmer” (Arkansas Gazette, Octo- 
ber 6th). The articles of incorporation of 
the union had been drawn “‘by Williamson 
and Williamson of Monticello, white men and 
ex-slaveholders” (Walter F. White in The 
Nation, December 6th). In this connection 
it is significant that the Committee of Seven 
found among the “ringleaders” of the move- 
ment “‘the oldest and most reliable of the 
Negroes whom we have known for the past 
fifteen years.” It would have been strange, 
indeed, if these men had lent themselves to a 
conspiracy “‘to put to death a dozen or more 
prominent white men, seize the land, and 


generally take over control of the country,” 
236 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


as the Committee of Seven charged (Asso- 
ciated Press Despatch, November 2d). Ap- 
‘parently the open inquiry courted by U. S. 
Bratton was not to take place. As Negro 
prisoners were brought into Helena from the 
stockade in which they had been confined 
in Elaine, plans were made to interrogate 
them. “It is now believed,” said The Ar- 
kansas Gazette of October 8th, “that no open 
hearings of the cases against the men and 
women charged with participating in the 
insurrection will be held. There are more 
than three hundred separate cases to be 
investigated, and it is believed that the hear- 
ings can be expedited if held privately.” 

The court proceedings during the trial of 
the Negro insurrectionists, in the course of 
which five colored men were found guilty of 
murder in the first degree by a white jury 
in seven minutes, are matters which might 
well claim a separate chapter. “It took the 
jury eight minutes to return a verdict against 
Frank Hicks,” said The Memphis Commercial 
Appeal of November 4th, “‘charged with the 
murder of Clinton Lee, a citizen of Helena, 
near Hoop Spur on the morning of October 
Ist. Hicks was found ‘guilty as charged 


in the indictment,’ the verdict automatically 
237 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


sending him to the electric chair. But that 
record was broken in the gathering afternoon 
darkness when a jury retired at 5.32 to decide 
the fate of five other Negroes charged with 
the murder of Lee. Seven minutes later they 
returned a verdict finding the defendants 
guilty, sending them to the electric chair.” 
It will be recalled that the trials of Negro 
farmers were held, without change of venue, 
in the very county in which the disorders 
had occurred, by juries composed of white 
men, from which Negroes were excluded. 
One colored man was sentenced to twenty- 
one years in the penitentiary. He had been 
charged with first-degree murder. “Material 
witnesses on the murder charge were absent,” 
said The Arkansas Gazette of November 8th, 
“and the court allowed the defendant to 
plead guilty to second-degree murder. The 
only witness to the murder of Corporal Earls 
is an officer recently discharged from the army, 
who could not be located in time for the trial.”’ 
It is almost unbelievable that in the United 
States a man could be convicted and sentenced 
to twenty-one years in prison without any 
witness appearing against him. Under the 
circumstances it is not astonishing that the 
defendant agreed to plead guilty to second- 
238 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


degree murder as an alternative to being 
sent to the electric chair. A correspondent 
of The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported 
on November 5th, when forty-eight colored 
men had been convicted, of whom eleven 
were sentenced to death, “Progress was not 
as rapid as expected because many Negroes 
hesitated before pleading guilty to the charge 
of second-degree murder, a compromise offered 
by the state.”” The despatch is full of matter 
which reveals the way of white juries in 
Arkansas with Negro defendants: “The first 
four Negroes arraigned at the afternoon 
session ... pleaded not guilty when the state 
offered to compromise with them if they 
would admit guilt to a second-degree charge. 
‘Call a jury,’ the court ordered, but before a 
jury was organized the Negroes changed 
their minds. They pleaded guilty to a charge 
of murder in the second degree and were 
sentenced to twenty-one years in the peni- 
tentiary.” At one point in the trials “after 
Judge Jackson had sentenced twenty-four 
Negroes for five years each,” the district 
attorney “arose and objected,” saying: “I 
do not think these Negroes are receiving 
sufficient punishment. These Negroes all 


were at the home of Frank Moore, armed and 
239 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


waiting.” In the offhand fashion of Arkansas 
trial procedure, the judge replied, “I think 
five years is enough,” and the arraignments 
continued. Unconscious irony laid its light 
touch on the despatch when the correspondent 
remarked, toward the close, “‘Expressions of 
regret over the necessity of condemning so 
large a number of Negroes is [szc] heard 
daily on the streets of the city and in the 
court-room.” The master touch, however, 
was attributed by The Arkansas Gazette of 
November 12th to Judge Jackson. The 
reader will recall that no Negroes were in- 
cluded in the jury which was convicting 
colored men of murder. ‘“‘Frank Moore,” 
said the court, “you have been declared 
guilty by a gury of your own choosing of murder 
in the first degree... .’ Judge Jackson 
denied new trials to the twelve Negroes 
who had been sentenced to die by electro- 
cution. But the Governor of Arkansas post- 
poned the executions in order to allow appeals 
to be filed in their behalf. A petition for 
habeas corpus, prepared for filing in the event 
that that should be necessary, in the federal 
district court in behalf of Frank Moore, one of 
the condemned men, draws together a number 


of the threads of this narrative. The peti- 
240 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


tion, after reciting that plantation-owners 
had not only declined to give share-croppers 
itemized statements of their indebtedness 
for supplies purchased from plantation stores 
and refused to let the share-croppers dispose 
of their crops, “‘but themselves. sell and 
dispose of the same at such prices as they 
please, and then give to the Negroes no 
account thereof, in this way keeping them 
down, poverty-stricken, and under their 
control.”’ Learning of the employment of 
Mr. U.S. Bratton as attorney by Negroes of 
a neighboring plantation, the petitioner and 
his associates “‘decided to hold a meeting 
with the view of seeing him while there, and 
engaging him as an attorney to protect their 
interests.” While they were assembled in 
their church, “‘parties from the outside com- 
menced shooting in the house, through the 
windows, fired many shots, shot out the 
lights, and shot one of the members, all of 
whom, so far as petitioner knows, were 
unarmed.” The church was subsequently 
burned by armed white men, “‘thus destroying 
the indubitable evidence of the assault upon 
said society.” The petitioner asserts that 
he and other colored prisoners were frequently 


taken before the Committee of Seven ‘“‘and 
16 241 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


were tortured both by whipping, beating, 
the application of electricity and strangling 
drugs to compel them to admit guilt which 
did not exist and to testify against each 
other; that this torturing was a frequent 
occurrence, many scars from which petitioner 
still bears upon his body ...” and that before 
the “body called the grand jury, composed 
exclusively of white men,” the petitioner 
and other Negro prisoners were frequently 
carried “in an effort to extract from them 
false incriminating admissions and to testify 
against each other, and that both before and 
after they were frequently whipped and 
tortured. . . .” The men in charge of the 
prisoners, this petition continues, “had some 
way of learning when the evidence given or 
statements made was unsatisfactory to the 
grand jury, and this was always followed by 
beating and whipping.” The attorney ap- 
pointed by the court to defend the petitioner 
“did not consult with him or the other de- 
fendants, took no steps to prepare for their de- 
fense, asked nothing about their witnesses... .” 
The trial “‘closed, so far as the evidence was 
concerned, with the state’s witnesses alone”’; 
and the jury “retired just long enough to 


write a verdict of guilty of murder in the 
242 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


first degree, as charged, and returned with it— 
not being out exceeding from three to five 
minutes; the whole proceeding, from begin- 
ning to end, occupied about three-fourths of 
an hour....’ There are certain statements 
in the petition for habeas corpus which 
might have been hearsay, but they were 
doubtless verifiable by the petitioner’s at- 
torney. Thus, it is stated that it had been 
the practice of thirty years’ standing not to 
choose Negroes to serve on juries, “‘notwith- 
standing the Negro population there exceeds 
the white population by more than five to one, 
and that a large proportion of them [Negroes] 
are electors and possess the legal, moral, and in- 
tellectual qualifications required or necessary 
for jurors; that the exclusion of said Negroes 
from the juries was at all times intentional, 
and because of their color, of their being 
Negroes; that such was the case of the 
grand jury by which petitioner and his co- 
defendants were indicted, and of the petit jury 
that pronounced them guilty.”’! The narra- 
tive of what occurred in Phillips County, 
Arkansas, in October of the year 1919 would 


1 Substantially the same facts were recited in a brief filed in the 
Supreme Court of Arkansas petitioning for a new trial for Frank 
Moore and other Negroes. 

243 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


be incomplete without some reference to the 
white attorney, U. S. Bratton, and his two 
sons, Capt. Guy G. Bratton and O. S. 
Bratton, who were so prominently identified 
in press reports with the “‘ Negro insurrection.” 
Mr. Bratton! asked of Senator Charles Curtis 
of Kansas that a federal investigation be 
undertaken of affairs in Phillips County. In 
explanation of his request he recited three 
circumstances: ‘“‘(1) My name and family 
have been brought imto and charged with 
being responsible for the recent troubles in 
Phillips County, Arkansas. One of my sons, 
O. S. Bratton, without reason therefor, came 
near being lynched, having been, without any 
reason therefor, arrested and kept in jail 
for thirty-one days, without any examination, 
or without opportunity being given for bail, 
or without even being informed of the charge 
held against him, and where it was asserted 
that a resort to the time-honored writ of 
habeas corpus to secure his release would 
result in his being murdered. 

(2) That a deliberate plot was laid to 
murder one of my sons, namely, Captain 
Guy G. Bratton, who had recently returned 
from France, where he had served as a cap- 


1 Copy of memorandum furnished me by Mr. Bratton. 
244 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


tain, being Division Intelligence Officer of the 
87th Division, and who had never even been 
in Phillips County since his return from the 
army and his discharge. 

(3) That it was publicly asserted that if 
I dared to enter the county of Phillips that 
I would be shot down; this near-lynching, 
plot to murder and threat against my life 
being for no reason other than the fact that 
I had dared to take the cases of poor, un- 
fortunate Negroes, who were being deliber- 
ately and systematically robbed of the fruits 
of their labor.””’ Mr. Bratton, speaking as a 
Southerner—‘my parents and my grand- 
parents were likewise Southerners’’—makes 
the unqualified statement that “the con- 
ditions that affect the colored man to-day 
in the South are even worse than they were 
before the Civil War... . The system of exploi- 
tation which goes on is such that the large 
majority of the Negroes work year in and 
year out without receiving anything except 
a scant and bare living. This system is so 
generally practised that the unfortunate Ne- 
groes are absolutely helpless to protect them- 
selves.” 

During his experience as Assistant United 


States Attorney, Mr. Bratton recites, “‘in- 
QA5 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


formation came to us that peonage was being 
practised in parts of the state; that certain 
parties ... had gone into the state of Texas 
and had transported a large number of Negro 
families to their plantations in Arkansas; 
that the Negroes were unable to get any 
settlement; that they were unable to get any 
statements of accounts, other than a small 
slip of paper upon which were written the 
words ‘balance due’; and that it was con- 
tended that any of these tenants, all of whom 
it was claimed were indebted to these parties, 
who undertook to leave the state, or, in fact, 
to leave the premises of these plantation- 
owners, were guilty of violation of the law.” 
After an investigation by a special agent 
of the Department of Justice, ‘warrants 
were issued for the offending parties and 
full investigations had before the United 
States grand jury, resulting in the indict- 
ment of the parties and their entering pleas 
of ‘guilty’ and paying fines. These facts 
will all be brought out by an examination 
of the records of the Department of Justice, 
to whom the reports were duly made.” Open 
prosecution of tenants for leaving farms has 
ceased. However, the landlords “‘accomplish 


the same result in a different way.” One 
246 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


of the means by which the system is main- 
tained is “‘a private understanding which 
the planters have among themselves that 
one will not take a Negro coming from 
another’s plantation who is indebted to the 
landlord from whose place he is coming, 
unless he, the landlord who is receiving him, 
is willing to pay the amount it is claimed 
by the other landlord is due him.” The 
so-called share-cropper system Mr. Bratton 
describes as follows: ‘‘When the Negroes 
start in the spring to make a crop, they are to 
be supplied with groceries and other neces- 
saries of life, to enable them to make a crop. 
The planters in the majority of cases have 
what is called ‘commissary stores,’ from 
which these supplies are furnished. The 
articles are furnished at whatever prices the 
planters and managers see fit to place them, 
the share-cropper being absolutely helpless, 
as he has nothing upon which to go and can- 
not go anywhere else to secure supplies, and 
hence his only recourse is to walk up to the 
commissary store and take whatever is 
dished out to him without any hesitation 
or question. At the time that this is done, 
he is not permitted to have any statement 


or bill of the articles purchased, but must 
247 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


permit the commissary-keeper to enter what- 
ever figures he sees fit to enter. Matters 
go on in this way until the crops are laid by, 
then no more supplies are furnished. The 
Negroes are then required to ‘rustle’ for 
subsistence until the gathering-time, when 
they will again be permitted in some cases 
to have their half of the money coming from 
the sale of the cotton seed. When they 
call for a settlement, they are furnished with 
a small slip, simply stating ‘balance due’ 
so much.” Mr. Bratton’s report is volumi- 
nous. Case after case is cited, with names, 
dates, and every sort of circumstantial detail. 
** As to the limits [to] which the plantation-man- 
agers will go before they will allow themselves 
to be interfered with in carrying out their 
practices, I would state that Sheriff Kitchens 
himself told my wife and the wife of my son, 
O. S. Bratton, that even if he should go down 
onto those plantations and interfere with 
their laborers that he would be shot down. 
Attention has also been called to the fact 
that my life has been threatened and that 
it had been said publicly that if I dared to 
enter the county of Phillips that I would be 
shot down. In support of the statement 


that my life has been threatened and endan- 
248 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


gered, I respectfully refer you to Hon. Henry 
Rector, Assistant United States Attorney, 
and E. L. McHaney, attorney, both of be 
Rock, Arkansas.” 

The recital of a “system” hardly conveys 
the human implications in suffermg and 
oppression, cruelties and injustices, which 
civilized people are prone to think banished 
from the world until violence and bloody 
disturbance bring them relentlessly in view. 
Of the moving stories in Mr. Bratton’s report 
it is possible to recite only one, and that 
one because it involves not only a victim, 
but a white jury and a state’s attorney: 

“IT have in mind,” says Mr. Bratton, “‘the 
ease of Ben Donagan, a Negro who lived in 
Phillips County, where this recent trouble 
occurred. The question arose between him 
and one of the managers of the plantation 
as to his rights in connection with pay for 
labor done: the manager then told him to 
leave the place and abandon his crop. The 
Negro sought the man whom he regarded 
as the owner of the plantation, laid his case 
before him, was told by this party to go back 
and keep out of the way of the manager 
until a certain time when he would be upon 


the plantation, at which time it was hoped 
249 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


that the matter could be adjusted. The 
Negro followed his suggestion. On the ap- 
pointed day when the party whom the Negro 
looked upon as owner of the plantation, 
and who in fact had bargained for it, and 
immediately after the occurrence became the 
recognized owner of it, came upon the planta- 
tion, the Negro started to meet the manager 
and the supposed owner. When he was 
discovered, they both turned, rode directly 
to him, and upon meeting him the manager 
deliberately fired into the Negro, shooting 
him down in the field, having shot him five 
times. The supposed owner, being a doctor, 
promptly turned his horse and rode away in 
the direction in which he and the manager 
had come. He made no attempt to inter- 
fere with the shooting and offered no medical 
assistance whatever until later he returned 
and sprinkled some bismuth or some powder 
of that nature upon the bleeding wounds. 
The Negro, realizing that he had no hope of 
relief, unless through the United States courts, 
applied to us to represent him. We filed 
suit in the United States court at Helena. ... 
The proof was so clear and the instructions 
to the court such that the jury could not fail 


to return a verdict, which they did, and 
250 


THE AMERICAN CONGO 


assessed the damages for a man being shot 
five times and made a cripple for life at the 
sum of one hundred dollars, notwithstanding 
the fact that the proof was so convincing 
that the jury could not return a_ verdict 
otherwise; still there was no prosecution 
in the criminal courts, and no indictment 
against the offenders was filed, although 
they were undoubtedly guilty of assault 
with intent to murder and the then prosecuting 
attorney of the state courts appeared as one 
of the defendants counsel and defended the 
suit in the United States court.” 

It will be seen that the conditions de- 
scribed in detail by Mr. Bratton coincide 
with those referred to by “‘A Southerner” 
in his letter to The Memphis Commercial 
Appeal and with statements in the Labor 
Department’s report on “Negro Migration 
in 1916-17.” The picture as it is suggested 
by excerpts from material far too voluminous 
for embodiment in any but a publication 
of the federal government places the “‘ Negro 
insurrection” and “‘massacre of whites” in 
different perspective than contemporary press 
accounts. It shows the entire machinery 
of civilization in the hands of a white group, 


many of whose members profit from the 
251 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


exploitation of the black man. It is that 
group which elects representatives to Congress. 
It is that group whose voice affects the 
procedure of the United States, not only 
with regard to affairs within the country, 
but in its commerce, industrial and political, 
with the nations and the peoples of the world. 
The consideration might give rise to anxious 
questioning as to the probable fate of the 
traditions of tolerance, freedom, courage, 
of the quality of civilization, and the con- 
ditions of human life when they are intrusted 
to such hands. 


IX 
“SOCIAL EQUALITY’? AND SEX 


6 ale Negro in the United States is looked 

upon by many white persons mainly 
as a sexual being: he constitutes a menace 
to the “purity ”’ of the white race; his presence 
bears a threat of racial amalgamation. In- 
dustrial and political relations fade into a 
sort of unreality when the question of sex 
is raised as between colored and white people. 
Among white Americans is developed a species 
of hysteria: the black man must not invade 
the white man’s sexual preserve. The violent 
emotions to which sex jealousy gives rise in 
personal relations find their counterpart in 
popular outbreaks. For the Negro man there 
is one unpardonable crime in the United 
States and that is transgression of the code 
which makes white women inaccessible to 
all except white men. In some twenty-nine 
states! marriage between white persons and 


1 According to The Negro Year-Book for 1918-19, p. 204. 
253 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


persons of color is prohibited either by the 
terms of the state constitution or by statute, 
and the white man’s feelings about “mis- 
cegenation” have the sanction of law. The 
American white man’s state of mind has its 
exact counterpart in Many savage or primi- 
tive societies. ‘“‘Inter-tribal marriages were 
once totally prohibited,” says Dennett, writ- 
ing of native Africans, “‘but to-day marriages 
take place, although the offspring of such 
unions are looked upon much in the same 
prejudiced light by the Bavili as the offspring 
of black and white races are looked upon by 
the Europeans.” No free Somali, reports 
Schurtz,! however poor, would marry his 
daughter to a despised metalsmith, or would 
himself enter into matrimony with a daughter 
of that caste. Feeling against race mixture, 
at its very strongest in North America, has 
no element that is especially characteristic 
either of the particular races or of the castes 
which happen to be involved: the same sort 
of prohibitions have prevailed and still prevail 
where no distinctions of color play any part. 
Nevertheless, sex relations, the question of 
the absorption of one race by another, the 
mingling of colors, are looked upon as the 


1 Heinrich Schurtz, Das Afrikanische Gewerbe, Leipzig, 1900, p. 43. 
254 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


irreducible and final kernel of race problems 
in the United States. But, as many white 
Americans would phrase it, the race problem 
in the United States involves a single simple 
decision, ““Would you allow your daughter 
to marry a Negro?” If the Negro progresses, 
acquires a competence and the means to 
leisure and education, he at the same time 
assimilates the white man’s culture and man- 
ners; he threatens to become fit to associate 
with white men on the basis of any test 
which white men may erect, except ancestry— 
and even in the veins of many persons of 
color flows the blood of the most distinguished 
white men of the nation’s past. The con: 
ception of race relations represented by the 
emphasis upon sex is given extraordinary 
currency by the press, by politicians who 
always seek to rouse men’s least governable 
impulses, and by white persons who have 
absorbed it as part of the credo that clings 
with all the tenacity of impressions and 
beliefs absorbed in childhood. In a sense the 
favorable development of race relations in the 
United States depends upon the supplanting 
of this over-simplified issue of sex by other 
more varied and more immediately pressing 


considerations. 
258 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


The process which most gravely menaced 
establishment of peace and order after the 
Civil War is still in progress. At that time 
organizations almost purely political in their 
intent found a pretext in the “protection 
of womanhood” from the “Negro fiend.” 
“It is one thing,’ remarks Professor Hart, 
“to read of the gallant struggle of the Ku- 
Klux to protect womanhood and to assert 
the nobility of the white race; it is quite 
another to be told, incidentally, that in a 
certain county of Mississippi the Ku-Klux 
‘put a hundred and nineteen niggers into 
the river.” That is what some people call a 
massacre.” 

The fury which it was possible to stimulate 
against Negroes in Omaha, in Washington, 
in Atlanta, had many contributing elements, 
industrial and political; but the direct incite- 
ment to violence was newspaper report of 
sexual crime. Persistent endeavors are made 
to keep this phase of race hatred alive in the 
South. As late as the spring of 1919 the 
“Loyal Order of Klansmen,”’ which derived 
its mummery from the old Ku-Klux, published 
appeals to white men of the South in the form 
of huge advertisements in the newspapers. 


““We are an all-Southern order, for Southern 
256 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


> 


men of white race,” said one advertisement, 
and the order was described as one “that 
protects the women of our Southland.” 
Beneath the skull and crossbones with its 
inscription “‘Ku-Klux Klan” was _ printed 
the invitation: “Join the Loyal Order of 
Klansmen and you solve the problem of law 
and order in our Southland. With one mill- 
ion men enrolled in the Loyal Order of Klans- 
men, our land will have peace and security 
and prosperity. If you wish to make your 
wives and daughters safe and happy join the 
Klan to-day... .’ The quotations are from 
the Charlotte, North Carolina, Sunday Ob- 
server of June 22,1919. This claptrap elicited 
commendation from the Governor of Mais- 
sissippl. A Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper, 
in speaking of the ‘“‘Loyal Order” as an organi- 
zation “‘forming in South Carolina principally 
for the protection of the white man’s woman- 
hood and civilization in the South,” quoted 
Governor Bilbo as follows, “I am strongly 
impressed with the need of such an organiza- 
tion in the Southland to-day, and wish to 
be one of the first to join.”” Southern senti- 
ment was not, however, unanimous with 
regard to the merits of the resuscitated Ku- 


Klux Klan. Governor Bickett of North Caro- 
17 257 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


lina was quoted in a despatch to The New 
York World of June 30, 1919, as calling upon 
‘‘all North Carolinians to repudiate this ‘des- 
perately wicked appeal to race prejudice.’ .. . 
Governor Bickett’s attack,’ continued the 
despatch, “which is said to be the first made 
by any Southern Governor on this organi- 
zation which is secretly sweeping over the 
South, comes in the middle of a campaign 
for membership.”” Governor Bickett further 
characterized the undertaking as “a hark 
back to the lawless time that followed the 
terrors of the Civil War, and there are paraded 
before the mind of the readers the terrors 
of those dark days. The very name that is 
written on the death head is a subtle appeal 
to the fears and prejudices of our people. 
. . . There is no need for any secret order to 
enforce the law of this land and the appeal 
to race prejudice is as silly as it is sinful.” 
Wicked, or silly, or sinful, such appeals repre- 
sent a state of opinion among large numbers 
of people which is, at the least, responsive. 
In the South, people’s minds are easily 
wakened to bitter memories, and the ground 
of hatred does not have to be laid. In the 
North, a subtler propaganda is necessary. 


The presumption against the Negro has to 
258 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


be created by singling out sexual crimes of 
individuals and making them seem char- 
acteristic of the race. The process has been 
adverted to as it was practised in Omaha 
and in Washington. It accomplished more 
than local outbreaks, however. It tends to 
justify terrorism and lynching as practices for 
‘keeping the Negro down”? in localities where 
he is stronger numerically than the white 
man. ‘Thus, if one were to judge from many 
editorial statements in Southern newspapers, 
one would believe that lynching was scarcely 
ever resorted to except in punishment for the 
crime of rape against white women. The atti- 
tude was well represented in a letter to 
one of the newspapers of New York in 
which the writer insisted that “no innocent 
Negroes are ever mistreated,’ and in an edi- 
torial of the Birmingham, Alabama, News, in 
which it is asserted that “all of these race 
riots [in the United States] have been caused 
by the attempts of Negro men to override 
the race line and to make white women the 
victims of their lustful passions.” In view 
of the confident assertions which are so fre- 
quently made, by Southern editors especially, 
it is worth while to consider the available 


evidence on the point. It appears that in the 
259 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


five-year period 1914-18 only 19.8 per cent., 
or less than one in five Negroes lynched in 
the United States, was accused of attack or 
rape committed upon women.! Of the 77 Ne- 
groes lynched in the United States in 1919, 
14, or 18.2 per cent., were accused of assault 
upon women.? It should be borne in mind 
that in the South “rape” and “intimacy” 
of a colored man and a white woman are not 
distinguished in so far as the penalty visited 
for the offenses. Both are punishable by 
death for the colored man, frequently by 
public burning at stake and with ingenious 
and perverse torture, such as the application 
to the victim of hot irons, the burning out 
of his eyeballs with red-hot pokers, and other 
mutilations which it is needless to describe. 
During 1919 fourteen colored men were 
publicly burned by mobs. In one extraor- 
dinary, though not unique, case newspapers 
of several states announced the time of day at 
which the colored man would be burned, and 
printed as part of the announcement a state- 
ment by the governor of one of the Southern 


1 Lynching statistics from Thirty Years of Lynching, published by 
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 
New York. 

2 From records of the National Association for the Advancement 
of Colored People. 

260 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


states that in the condition of public senti- 
ment he was unable to prevent the murder. 
The Jackson, Mississippi, Daily News of 
June 26, 1919, announced that the officers 
of the law had agreed to turn the colored man 
over to the mob, to be burned alive, without 
trial: ‘*The officers have agreed to turn him 
over to the people of the city at four o’clock 
this afternoon, when it is expected he will be 
burned.” It is the thought of sexual inter- 
course between colored men and white women 
that provokes the easily roused fury of many 
white Americans at the mere mention of 
“social equality.” It is this reservoir of 
emotion which breaks bounds not only when 
Negroes commit crimes, but when they are 
indiscreet enough to prosper. ‘Testimony is 
overwhelming on the point that the South’s 
color psychosis is rooted in this sex jealousy. 
It is convenient for political and industrial 
purposes to have such an easily roused emo- 
tionality. Any Negro may be accused of want- 
ing “social equality.” Any white man may 
be accused of being a “‘nigger-lover” and of 
desiring “‘social equality”? for Negroes. The 
Negro who dares to “‘preach”’ social equality 
will be done to death. The white man will 


be mobbed and driven from the community. 
261 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


What does the white American mean by 
social equality? ‘To take the words at their 
face value, one would suppose he meant 
association of colored and white persons in 
the home, personal intercourse without regard 
to race. In practice the denial of social 
equality is not confined to personal relations, 
but includes civil procedure. The socially 
inferior Negro is exploited on the farm 
because white lawyers will not take his case 
against white planters. As socn as the bar 
of social inferiority is broken down the Negro 
threatens the white man with competition. 
A civilization which depends for its economic 
foundation upon cheap and ignorant labor, 
which finds it necessary to deny education 
to large numbers of its colored citizens in 
order to insure a supply of that cheap and 
socially inferior labor, cannot face readjust- 
ment without grave stresses and _ strains. 
Every demand for common justice for the 
Negro, that he be treated as a human being, 
if not as a United States citizen, can be and 
is met with the retort that the demand is for 
social equality. Instantly every chord of 
jealousy and hatred vibrates among certain 
classes of whites—and in the resulting atmos- 


phere of unreasoning fury even the most 
262 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


moderate proposals for the betterment of 
race relations take on the aspect of impos- 
sibilism. By the almost universal admission 
of white men and of white newspapers, denial 
of social equality does not mean what the 
words imply. It means that Negroes can- 
not obtain justice in many Southern courts; 
it means that they cannot obtain decent 
education, accommodation in public places 
and on common carriers; it means that every 
means is used to force home their helplessness 
by insult, which, if it is resisted, will be fol- 
lowed by the administration of the torch or 
the hempen rope or the bullet. 

There is an aspect of social equality which 
is not often discussed. It involves the posi- 
tion of colored women. White Americans are 
fond of talking of colored women as unchaste. 
It is a stigma which is made to attach to all 
women of color in the United States. Their 
social inferiority deprives them of the pro- 
tection which is due their sex, and the “‘un- 
alterable” opposition of white Americans to 
social equality is found to be directed only 
against the colored men. What colored 
women of the United States have had to 
endure in silence may yet provide a national 


drama with the tragedy it has_ lacked. 
263 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Only in very recent years has it begun to 
dawn upon many white Americans that if 
the white race is to be kept “pure,” white 
men as well as women must keep it so. A 
letter to the Birmingham, Alabama, News 
written in October, 1919, states the case 
bluntly in that the mulatto and “mongrel” 
race is laid at the door of the white man who 
*“‘erossed the race line. . . . The sordid de- 
tails of the race crossing and the inevitable 
effects on the mind and passion of the inferior 
race are facts too familiar and repulsive to 
be enumerated here.” The legal barriers 
to the intermarriage of white and colored 
people are justified on racial grounds. It is 
asserted first that the races do not mix, 
that the resulting mulattoes are “inferior.” 
The position is untenable, as was shown in 
an earlier chapter. There is no evidence to 
show that the descendants of race mixture 
are inferior. On the other hand, those who 
wish to depreciate the Negro point to the 
leaders of the Negro as being men of lighter 
color and ascribe their superiority to the 
admixture of white blood. The rule will 
hardly work both ways. As for racial antipa- 
thy, its effectiveness is to be questioned in 


view of the stringent legislation which has 
264 


) 
: 
: 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


been necessary to prevent marriage between 
white persons and persons of color. In fact, 
it is a tendency well known to anthropologists 
and to psychologists, among numbers of de- 
veloped and heterosexual persons of all races, 
to seek sexual experience and mates in mem- 
bers of races other than their own. To this 
tendency white persons of both sexes in the 
United States are hardly immune. “‘The 
North,” says Professor Hart, “is often accused 
of putting into the heads of Southern Negroes 
misleading and dangerous notions of social 
equality, but what influence can be so potent 
in that direction as the well-founded con- 
viction of Negro women that they are desired 
to be the nearest of companions to white 
men?” It will be seen that in the present 
state of information available to white Ameri- 
cans concerning race and race mixture the 
fury which greets infractions of the sexual 
code of the South cannot be justified or ex- 
plained by a deep-rooted “instinct” to keep 
the white race pure. The barriers to race 
mixture are primarily social rather than 
instinctive or racial, and they are fortified 
by a variety of economic considerations 
some of which have been indicated. 


Why, then, have white men sought out 
265 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


colored women? In slave days the colored 
women had little or no protection against 
the white man. At present, civil and indus- 
trial and political disabilities where they are 
imposed upon Negroes operate to deprive 
the colored woman of her protection. Fre- 
quently colored women do not tell their men 
of insult offered them by white men because 
it would be death for the colored man to ask 
redress. In the spring of 1919 a seventy-two- 
year-old colored man was hanged by a mob 
in Georgia because he dared with a gun to 
defend two terrified colored girls from the 
advances of two drunken white men who 
had come late at night into the Negro-resi- 
dence district. The facts in the case were 
established by The Atlanta Constitution. They 
represent easily exploitable sexual opportunity 
for white men of certain communities among 
colored women. Freudian psychology has an 
explanation for the strong tendency that has 
been characteristic of white men of the ruling 
caste to seek colored women.! It rests upon 
the principle that the choice of the mate is 
influenced by the characters impressed upon 
the infant male as belonging to his mother. 
The mother, being the first woman who 


1 T am indebted for this suggestion to Dr. A. A. Brill of New York. 
266 


€ 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


enters emotionally into the infant’s life, pro- 
vides a first pattern which the man endeavors 
to find again in his wife. Many Southern 
men of family were brought up by colored 
““mammies.” So far as their infantile impres- 
sions were concerned, a colored face and their 
mammy’s personality represented to them 
emotionally all that any mother could. Ar- 
riving at sexual maturity, the white man, 
actuated by the mechanism described, found 
himself impelled toward colored women. At 
the same time he found a rigid social system 
discountenancing any legitimate sexual rela- 
tionship such as marriage. So he had either 
to repress his impulse by the aid of an exag- 
gerated depreciation of colored people or he 
indulged and found it necessary to justify 
himself with the explanation that, being of an 
inferior race, colored women deserved no 
better. Thus at once an exception was es- 
tablished to the code of chivalry; and the 
doctrine of racial inferiority of the Negro was 
fortified by the emotional mechanism of the 
individual. To some extent the institution 
of the mammy is passing and remains chiefly 
as tarnished glory in the oratorical flights of 
reminiscent politicians. But that the ““mam- 


my complex,” owing to the close association 
267 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


of colored women and white infants, had its 
effect upon the emotional and sex adjustments 
of white and colored people in the South, 
there seems strong probability. 

To the colored American the problem of 
sex relations is presented quite differently 
than to the white. The colored man is the 
object of the barriers against intermarriage. 
If white men cannot in many states openly 
marry Negro women, they may still live with 
them out of wedlock. But the colored man 
who should be tempted to illicit sex relations 
with a white woman bears in mind the violent 
death that will attend discovery of his indis- 
cretion. He finds that whatever phase of 
race relations he is involved in, he will prob- 
ably be accused of claiming “social equality.” 
If the charge can be proved against him, 
he knows he must die. Much of the increased 
bitterness that accompanied the induction of 
American Negroes into the United States 
army had to do with sex jealousy. Fierce 
resentment met the status of “equality” 
with white soldiers that came automatically 
to colored soldiers. A veritable panic of 
apprehension and rage swept many white 
communities at the stories which were widely 


circulated concerning the intimacy of colored 
268 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


soldiers and white women in France. Fear, 
which is only another aspect of jealousy, 
motivated the measures intended to deprive 
colored troops of social intercourse with white 
persons in France. Fear brought about the 
resentful and aggressive determination of the 
white American to show the Negro that, 
whatever had occurred in France, he was not 
to enjoy ‘“‘social equality” in the United 
States and that white women were as far 
as ever beyond the reach of his aspiration. 
The fact that the fear of intimate relations 
between colored soldiers and white women 
was fictitious and bore little relation to the 
facts did not mitigate the intensity of the 
feeling. Most colored men, as most colored 
newspapers, disclaim for the American Negro 
any general desire to intermarry with mem- 
bers of the white race. The social difficulties 
imposed upon persons so intermarrying are 
such that the situation of persons entering 
upon such a relationship frequently becomes 
intolerable. If intermarriage between Jew 
and Gentile offers such social difficulties 
that they frequently act as deterrents, how 
much greater the difficulties where there is 
distinction of color. However, the position 


in which the colored man is placed in the 
269 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


United States 1s a dangerous challenge to 
his pride. He may have no inclination to any 
commerce with women not of his own race. 
But when he is prohibited to have such com- 
merce, when the prohibition is made a symbol 
of his “inferiority,” he cannot fail to resent 
it. ‘The case was put by Dr. W. E. B. DuBois 
in The Crisis of January, 1920. The Negro 
might say, according to Doctor DuBois, that 
he did not want to marry a woman of another 
race “or a woman may say, I do not want 
to marry this black man, or this red man, 
or this white man... but the impudent 
and vicious demand that all colored folk 
shall write themselves down as brutes by a 
general assertion of their unfitness to marry 
other decent folk is a nightmare... .” The 
response is what might be expected of any 
human being to such a prohibition. It may 
be, and, in present state of race relations 
undoubtedly is, impracticable that there be 
intermarriage to any appreciable extent. But 
in any circumstances the question of inter- 
marriage could more safely be left to the 
decision of the individuals concerned than to 
politicians with a vested political interest in 
race hatred. The difficulties in the way of 


the Negro’s progress are such as to deter 
270 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


most white persons from subjecting them- 
selves to them by marriage. On racial grounds 
no prohibition of intermarriage has as yet 
been justified. 

What the implications are of the denial 
of social equality is known to too few Ameri- 
cans. In the Labor Department’s report 
of the migration of Negroes from Georgia 
in 1916-17 the social causes playing a part 
are listed as: injustice in the courts, lynching, 
discrimination in public conveyances, and 
inequalities in educational advantages. Some- 
thing of the treatment accorded by white 
men’s courts of the South has been indicated 
in the story of the Arkansas riots. It is 
not only when passion runs high, however, 
that the black man has cause to wonder 
at and bitterly to resent what the white man 
euphemistically calls justice. Overzealous- 
ness on the part of county and police officials 
in rounding up Negroes for petty offenses is 
referred to in the Labor Department’s report 
of the migration from Georgia: “The limit 
fine or sentence to work the county roads is 
often imposed.” “The abnormal, unwar- 
ranted activities of Southern police officers,” 
says another of the Labor Department’s 


investigators, “are responsible for deep griev- 
271 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


ances among Negroes. In many cases the 
police have been the tools of powers higher 
up. Many colored people believe that em- 
ployers of convicts urge the police to greater 
activities among Negroes in order to fill up 
convict camps; and, as if encouraging arrests, 
the authorities frequently do not pay the 
constable and other petty officers’ salaries 
for their services, but reward them in accord- 
ance with the number of arrests made. Nat- 
urally, they get all out of it that the business 
will stand. The Negro suffers and pays the 
bill.” In the cities the Negro is frequently 
sentenced on evidence on which a white man 
would go free. The Negro’s testimony rarely, 
if ever, avails against the white man. But 
the supreme failure of the white man’s system 
of justice is the ascendancy of the white mob. 
The emotion which animates the mob has a 
large component of sex jealousy. Yet lynch- 
ings take place on any one of dozens of 
pretexts. One colored man was lynched in 
1919 because he failed soon enough to turn 
out of the road for white men. The wide- 
spread belief in the “racial lust”’ of the Negro 
stimulates the fury of a mob. So suggestible 
is the white man in consequence that many 


a colored man has been lynched because he 
272 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


followed some white girl or because she 
imagined it and ran screaming away. The 
quality of justice which prevails for the 
colored man in many Southern communities 
was exemplified in the case of Bragg Williams, 
who was taken from the Hill County, Texas, 
jail and publicly burned at stake. He had 
previously been sentenced to death for murder. 
*‘Notice of appeal from the sentence was filed 
by Wiulliams’s attorneys to-day,” said the 
Austin, Texas, American of January 20, 1919, 
‘“‘and this action is said to have led the mob 
to taking the case into its own hands.” One 
mob murder was reported by Walter White, 
in The Crisis of May, 1918, of Jim Mcllheron, 
a prosperous colored man who dared to re- 
sent the insults of white men. He defended 
himself on one occasion, and so doing killed 
two white men: ‘“‘Men, women, and children 
started into the town of Estill Springs from 
a radius of fifty miles. A spot was chosen 
for the burning. MclIlheron was chained to 
a hickory-tree while the mob howled about 
him. A fire was built a few feet away and 
the torture began. Bars of iron were heated 
and the mob amused itself by putting them 
close to the victim, at first without touching 


him. One bar he grasped, and as it was 
18 273 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


jerked from his grasp all the inside of his 
hand came with it. Then the real torturing 
began, lasting for twenty minutes. During 
that time, while his flesh was slowly roasting, 
the Negro never lost his nerve.” This oc- 
curred in Tennessee in the year 1918. Given 
such exhibitions and those which accompanied 
the brutal doing to death of a prosperous 
colored farmer, Anthony Crawford, at Abbe- 
ville, South Carolina, it is not strange that 
many Negroes came to feel “that character 
and worth secure no more protection for 
them than less desirable qualities, and that 
no Negro is safe.” The contempt for the 
socially “‘inferior’’ Negro which makes possible 
such barbarity as 83 lynchings in 1919 man- 
ifests itself in many ways. The exploiter 
of the Negro can use the denial of social 
equality for his own purposes, and, as Mr. 
R. H. Leavell found, “‘under Southern con- 
ditions the employing class can buttress their 
economic exploitation of the weaker Negro 
laborer and absolve themselves by appeal to 
race prejudice, which in many cases seems to 
have become a sort of religion.”” As has been 
pointed out, it is the prosperous Negro against 
whom the denial of “social equality” is 


directed. Labor is what is wanted, not human 
274 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


beings. Said Gov. Theodore Bilbo of Mis- 
sissippi in reply to a query from Chicago: 
“Your telegram asking how many Negroes 
Mississippi can absorb received. In reply 
I desire to state that we have all the room 
in the world for what we know as ‘n-i-g-g-e-r-s,’ 
but none whatever for ‘colored ladies and 
gentlemen.’ If these Negroes have been con- 
taminated with Northern social and political 
dreams of equality, we cannot use them, 
nor do we want them. The Negro who 
understands his proper relation to the white 
man in this country will be gladly received 
by the people of Mississippi, as we are very 
much in need of labor.” ! Issuing from the 
governor of a state, the words might be sup- 
posed to represent some small group at least 
of the population of Mississippi. The indif- 
ference to human values which they show, 
where a dark skin is involved, in fact repre- 
sents a group far larger than any in Mississippi. 

To look upon any man as a source of labor, 
and inject into relations with his group con- 
stant tension which comes of potential fury 
of sex jealousy, is to involve those relations 
in the gravest sort of danger. Anything any 


1The Crisis, January, 1920. Quotation from Chicago Herald- 


Examiner. 
275 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


member of the man’s group does may be 
and often is misinterpreted. The Negro, 
smarting under the sting of a peculiarly 
flagrant injustice, if he acts to obtain redress, 
although his objective may be simply the 
injustice in question, will be accused by 
white men of an effort to bring about “social 
equality ’—the objective of the Negro being 
conceived as white womanhood. By this 
process the relations of colored and white 
people of the United States are sexualized 
to a degree almost unbelievable. It is upon 
the pretext of the necessity for maintaining 
the “‘purity”’ of the white race that the white 
supremacy of Southern states is based. It is 
with this dogma dominant, and the emotions 
which cling to it, that the South and the 
nation must face the dilemma of open and 
deliberate violation of the letter and the 
spirit of the federal Constitution and _ its 
amendments. The editor of the Birmingham, 
Alabama, News pointed out on July 11, 1919, 
that a reapportionment of representation 
in accordance not with population, but with 
votes actually cast, would cost the Southern 
states 64 Representatives: Alabama, 7; Arkan- 
sas, 3; Florida, 2; Georgia, 9; Kentucky, 1; 
Louisiana, 6; Maryland, 1; Mississippi, 6; 
276 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


North Carolina, 3; South Carolina, 6; Okla- 
homa, 2; Tennessee, 3; Texas, 9; Virginia, 6. 
Whence is derived the resistance to conformity 
with constitutional amendment and to forti- 
fying the representation of Southern states 
by having the colored people vote for the men 
who are supposed to represent them in 
Washington? Many would answer that the 
hostility to equal opportunity for Negroes 
is a consequence of their numerical inferiority 
in many communities. In fact, as Professor 
Hart remarked, “the hostility to the Negro 
is based not on his numbers, but on his sup- 
posed inferiority of character,” and it is this 
dogma of inferiority that is used to make more 
terrible the menace of the Negro’s supposed 
aspirations to social equality and to white 
womanhood. Upon what is the dogma based? 
“The Southern whites, with few exceptions, 
teach no Negroes, attend no Negro church 
services, penetrate into no Negro society, 
and they see the Negro near at hand chiefly 
as unsatisfactory domestic servants, as field 
hands of doubtful profit, as neglected and 
terrified patients, as clients in criminal suits 
or neighborhood squabbles, as prisoners in 
the dock, as convicted criminals, as wretched 


objects for the vengeance of a mob.” Usually, 
277 


O 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


when a doctrine is so necessary to social order 
that discussion of the one involves destruc- 
tive criticism of the other, the doctrine be- 
comes divine. This divinity attaches to the 
purity of the white race and to white woman- 
hood. The force which Henry Adams con- 
ceived to be lacking in American art and 
letters, the Virgin or Venus, has, by a sort 
of ironical gesture, condescended to the Ameri- 
can political scene. Sex is the motive force 
which makes the Negro’s status dominate 
the South as a political issue and a question 
of practical politics. Sex is the distorted 
glass through which the Negro is presented 
to view by the press of the country. Southern 
politics demands a statesmanship of prohibi- 
tions and suppressions. The South’s color 
psychosis, which weighs so heavily upon free 
discussion that the implications of tolerance 
are known only in small non-political circles, 
is rooted in the suppression of open discussion 
of sex and the Negro. Much invective finds 
its way into public print. But let any one 
who believes that discussion is possible pro- 
pose to the Southern Sociological Congress a 
scientific investigation of the effects of race 
mixture. In a sense it is true that questions 


of sex and social equality are at the root 
278 


ee 


“SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND SEX 


of the race problem. They will continue 
to occasion an easily roused emotionality, at 
the disposition of cheap politicians and ex- 
ploiters of labor, just as long as they continue 
immune to discussion. Just so long as a 
panic of sexual apprehension seizes com- 
munities in which Negroes or white “‘nigger- 
lovers” dare to assert that the Negro has any 
prerogatives which white men, the white 
man’s officers and courts, the white man’s 
society, are bound to respect, just so long will 
irreconcilable race conflict be rooted in the 
blind processes of unreason. 

Some critic may yet pursue relentlessly 
the sexlessness and the impotence of Amer- 
ican arts and letters. He might recall the 
picture Samuel Butler drew of a land so 
dominated by machines that the people 
finally rose.to throw off their oppression, 
making it a crime to carry so much machin- 
ery even as is contained in a watch. In 
the United States he would find the chief 
force of sexual expression in jazz. He would 
find apathetic audiences dragged wondering 
through musical Parthenons, Gothic cathe- 
drals, Louvres, Pinakotheks, and drawing- 
rooms, to respond with an appreciative roar 


to intimations that beyond lay the jungle. 
279 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


The Negro may be excluded from the dancing- 
floor, but he plays the music. He may be 
denied orchestra seats, and still the audience 
will prefer his composition to Brahms’s. He 
may not vote, he may not mingle socially 
with white people, but the music to which 
the jumbled American political scene seems 
to vibrate and sway is jazz. The South can 
exclude the Negro from everything but its 
own thought and emotions and those of the 
nation. 


X 
THE NEW NEGRO 


Ipee American Negro, before the World 

War, was the despair of radicals, even 
of liberals. In education the mass of colored 
people had been living on the discarded 
remnants, both text-books and methods, of 
white schools. Politically they had all but 
accepted the belief current in the Southern 
states that their government was not and 
would not be a democracy. As individuals, 
fiercely though their resentment might blaze 
at brutalities and indignities visited upon 
men and women of color and at the universal 
discrimination in industry, they had to ac- 
quiesce in the treatment meted out to them. 
The avenue to power for the colored citizen 
apparently lay outside politics, in acquiring 
technical skill, possessions and the influence 
accompanying them. Negro leadership, es- 
pecially as it was represented by Booker T. 


Washington, looked to their becoming in- 
281 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


dispensable to the nation as_ toilers—arti- 
sans or farmers. The problem of adjusting 
the race to the American scene was envis- 
aged mainly as one of putting it upon its 
feet financially. With all except a militant, 
though growing, minority, emphasis was upon 
qualifying for the white man’s civilization 
by meeting his economic requirements. Of 
this adjustment the social implication was a 
Negro as nearly as possible like the white 
man, at the expense even of trying to be like 
the white man. Many a Negro hoped to 
achieve peace by conformity; therefore con- 
servatism became a sort of norm for colored 
people in the United States. Social standards 
are rarely flexible, and the tendency of colored 
people to adopt those of white persons made 
for a certain intellectual inflexibility in people 
otherwise sensitive to suggestion and to the 
vivid and the new. This and a lasting grati- 
tude toward the Republican party, as repre- 
senting federal protection for colored peo- 
ple, made what seemed to be a solid block 
of conservatives of colored people in the 
United States. Economically, the attitude 
had value and bore fruit. Even its bitterest 
critics admit the accomplishments of trade 


and agricultural schools. Many colored peo- 
282 


THE NEW NEGRO 


ple were enabled to leave behind them the 
wasting hazards of casual and exploited labor. 
Many, having obtained business training, 
taught their fellows or advanced their own 
fortunes. The story of Tuskegee, as Booker 
Washington has told it, has much that should 
give to every generous American pride and 
Inspiration. 

But Negroes in the United States found the 
attempt at economic progress alone insufh- 
cient. That progress was checked by the 
barriers of the white man’s civilization. As 
early as 1910 and before then, groups of 
colored people and their white friends realized 
that the white man’s political power could 
be used to nullify the Negro’s economic 
progress. With a dominant and aggressive 
white minority in control, after 1876, not only 
of the ballot and political machinery, but of 
courts, no colored man’s progress became 
secure. Given agrarian conditions such as 
are illumined by the Arkansas disorders, with 
the impossibility of obtaining redress and the 
absence of adequate education, and it was 
obvious numbers of colored people had little 
or no opportunity for advancement. Add 
to political and civil disabilities social dis- 


crimination directed especially against the 
283 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


successful individual of color, and Booker 
Washington’s avenue to freedom became per- 
ilously insecure. One of the most forceful 
of Washington’s critics, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, 
soon came to the conclusion that if the Negro 
was to find existence in the United States 
tolerable he must boldly demand and conquer 
for himself full civil rights and the ballot. 
In the development of political consciousness 
of the Negro in the United States Doctor 
DuBois and his periodical, The Crisis, played 
an important part. Pride and assertion of 
the dignity of manhood and womanhood for 
individuals of the race came from him and 
found increasing response among colored peo- 
ple throughout the nation. Doctor DuBois 
took American professions at their face value, 
and inquired pointedly and bitterly into mob 
violence and lynching, into segregation, dis- 
franchisement, and discrimination. Accom- 
panying the spiritual revolt from what many 
colored people regarded as the submissiveness 
of Booker Washington and his followers— 
a willingness to acknowledge the superiority 
of the white man—came the rapid growth of a 
Negro middle class, with its professional men, 
its industrial leaders, and its urban standards 


of life and social intercourse. A Negro press 
284 


THE NEW NEGRO 


grew until there were few communities so 
small as to be untouched by some publication 
edited by and for colored people. It is in- 
vidious to measure the progress of any group 
of people by its economic standing: philoso- 
phy, fable, and the most moving of the world’s 
poetry and songs have come from slaves. 
But the Negro’s economic status conditioned 
his political consciousness in the United 
States. Thus, it is significant that in the 
decade 1900 to 1910, whereas the number of 
Negroes in agricultural pursuits increased 
35 per cent., the increase in trade and trans- 
portation amounted to 103 per cent., and in 
manufacturing and mechanical pursuits to 
156 per cent. The increase of 186 per cent. 
represented a rise in the number of Negroes 
engaged in industry from 275,149 to 704,174. 
Mr. Monroe Work has published a statis- 
tical abstract of fifty-three years of progress 
of the Negro in the United States. His figures 
show an increase in the number of homes 
owned from 12,000 in 1866 to 600,000 in 1919. 
In the same period colored people increased 
the number of farms they operate by 980,000. 
In The Negro Year-Book for 1918-19 Mr. Work 
estimated the number of Negroes engaged in 


business enterprises as not less than 50,000, ex- 
285 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


clusive of more than 10,000 boarding- and lodg- 
ing-house keepers. An illuminating parallel 
of the industrial advance of the Negro in 
fifty years shows him engaged in 37 sorts of 
business in 1867 and in 187 kinds of business 
in 1917. In the latter year his enterprises 
included automobile service and garage, con- 
tracting and building, hotelkeeping, lumber 
business, real estate, and banking, tailor- 
ing, stock-raising, and theaters. Insurance, 
according to Mr. Work, one of the most 
important forms of business activity of Ameri- 
can Negroes, is conducted by their own 
companies, of which one had $1,944,910 in- 
surance in force in 1915. For the bourgeoisie 
thus developing, a press was essential. Mr. 
Work listed some 450 periodicals published 
by or for Negroes in the United States, 
of which 220 were newspapers and 7 were 
magazines of general literature. Among the 
foremost of the Negro newspapers in the 
United States are The Chicago Defender with a 
nation-wide circulation of more than 150,000, 
The New York Age and The News, The Colorado 
Statesman, the Atlanta (Georgia) Independent, 
The St. Lowis Argus, The Pittsburgh Courter, 
and The Richmond Planet. The develop- 


ment of the Negro press in the United States 
286 


THE NEW NEGRO 


represents in part business enterprise. But 
its astonishing success, the multiplicity of 
tiny and obscure sheets in small communities, 
as well as the avid reception of powerful 
organs like The Chicago Defender in the South, 
represent a well-founded distrust of the 
accounts of Negro doings in the white press. 
As late as December, 1919, the Associated 
Negro Press sent a news story to its sub- 
scribers, pointing out that in an Associated 
Press (white) report of a new diving apparatus 
which would enable salvage operations at 
hitherto unattempted depths, the fact had 
been omitted that the inventor was a Negro. 
Frequently accounts of racial troubles which 
appear in the Negro press contradict the 
assertions or the implications to be drawn 
from statements in the white press. Where 
a propaganda occurs in the white press such 
as helped bring about the disorders in Omaha, 
Washington, and Chicago, the Negro press 
vigilantly runs down exaggerations and mis- 
statements. Frequently, as has been said, 
the Negro is better informed of the cause 
and the nature of race conflict than is the 
white man. Exaggerations occur on both 
sides. The Negro press, with a few exceptions, 


has not the machinery or the means which 
287 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


make possible the largest white news ser- 
vices, and bitterness more often shows itself 
obviously in the presentation of news in the 
Negro press than in the white. The dis- 
tinction, however, is one of subtlety rather 
than of standards. White newspapers have 
nothing to teach the Negro press of fairness 
in the treatment of news of race relations. 
How important the Negro press has been 
in the process of the Negro’s becoming 
politically articulate can be measured by the 
statements of white men. Magazines like 
The Crisis and Challenge, newspapers like 
The Defender, are cordially execrated among 
white men in the South. An article in The 
Defender was held responsible for the riot in 
Longview, Texas. Gov. Charles Brough of 
Arkansas said he believed The Crisis and 
Defender were responsible for the Arkansas 
riots and announced his intention of asking 
the Postmaster-General to exclude them from 
the mails. Measured by the editorial utter- 
ances of their haters and detractors, Negro 
editors have been potent indeed, for they are 
credited with the power of creating the most 
violent conflicts that American communities 
have known, short of war. It will be seen 


that before the war the American Negro had 
288 


THE NEW NEGRO 


the nucleus at least of a fully evolved bour- 
geois society. Representatives of his race 
served the government as legal officers, as 
consular agents with diplomatic responsibili- 
ties. Poets of the race, Paul Laurence Dun- 
bar, James Weldon Johnson; entertainers and 
actors among whom Bert Williams stands out; 
essayists and critics of the caliber of William 
Stanley Braithwaite and Doctor DuBois; 
musicians of the rank of R. Nathaniel Dett, 
J. Rosamond Johnson, Harry Burleigh—have 
a place in American civilization independent 
of any condescension to their Negro blood. 
Whether or not the American musical comedy 
is an art form or merely a form of dissipation 
is a question subject to the vagary of indi- 
vidual taste. That it has been the medium 
through which countless Americans have ex- 
perienced what passes for instrumental music, 
the dance, song, gaiety is indubitable. To no 
small degree is the development of American 
musical comedy, its intriguing rhythms and 
its popular songs, due to colored composers 
and librettists. In the gap between American 
idealism and the hard-boiled soul of American 
practicality the American Negro has inter- 
posed his warmth and vivacity. More and 


more the Negro spirituals and plantation 
19 989 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


melodies, debased and all but obscured by 
jazz, are coming seriously into their own 
on the concert stage and in the works of 
serious composers. It is not here a question 
of comparative merit. The Negro has intro- 
duced human values into American civilization 
of a sort in which it has been found peculiarly 
lacking. The Negro plays, sings, dances for 
the love of what he is doing and experiencing. 
In this he is fitted to become the teacher and a 
vivifying force in a civilization preoccupied 
by ulterior motives. 

It will be seen that in all but name the 
“new Negro” was already in existence, a 
far cry from the humble servitor, the “‘good 
old darky,”’ the mythical personality com- 
pounded of servility, vice, and gratitude. 
If between the evolved and educated Negro 
citizen and the drifting roustabout of the far 
South yawns the interval between the primi- 
tive and the civilized, that same gap is 
observable among white men in New York 
City. It is almost needless to remind that 
the manner of the Aurignacian age sometimes 
disguises itself in the language of United 
States Senators. The “new Negro,” then, is 
a name not so much for a being brought into 


existence during the World War as for that 
290 





THE NEW NEGRO 


being’s awareness of himself and his immediate 
problems. Certain colored men, notably A. 
Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of 
The Messenger, a monthly magazine, gave the 
term special significance in that they applied 
it to the class-conscious, revolutionary Socialist 
whom they in part represented, but mainly 
hoped to evoke. They took their theory 
and their terminology from orthodox Marxian 
Socialism and preached that in the class war, 
in the identification of the Negro worker with 
working-class solidarity and revolution, lay 
the only solution of the Negro question in 
the United States. This left wing represented 
the farthest swing away from the accom- 
modating optimism of Booker Washington. 
It repudiated even Doctor DuBois and The 
Crisis, together with all reform movements 
for the advancement of the Negro under 
the capitalist system. The Messenger urged 
the Negro’s identity of imterest with the 
Industrial Workers of the World, as a worker 
for the most part unskilled, without political 
rights, disfranchised, and exploited. “The 
chief need of the Negro is the organization of 
his industrial power,” said The Messenger 
of October, 1919. Emphasis was again laid 


upon the importance to the Negro of his 
291 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


economic might. But new standards of criti- 
cism had come into the Negro press with 
The Messenger. Urging class solidarity, the 
editors at the same time mercilessly criticized 
their own race, its church, its leadership. 
The men who had led the struggle against 
lynching, civil disabilities, and disfranchise- 
ment were held up for observation to the 
“new Negro” as accepters of the capitalist 
state. And against that state the onus of 
The Messenger’s criticism was directed. Doc- 
tor DuBois, Prof. Kelly Miller, Archibald H. 
Grimke, William Pickens, James Weldon 
Johnson, and other leaders of Negroes in the 
United States met what might be called 
severe praise at the hands of the editors of 
The Messenger. Radicalism, for The Messen- 
ger, was the measuring-stick for future leader- 
ship toward the full emancipation of the 
Negro. As the old leaders showed themselves 
susceptible to the economic interpretation 
of social forces they were justified; otherwise 
their failings were ruthlessly commented upon. 
In a scathing reply to Representative Byrnes 
of South Carolina, who raised the cry of 
“radicalism” among Negroes which the white 
press and the Department of Justice took up, 


the editors of The Messenger stated their 
292 | 


THE NEW NEGRO 


position in unequivocal terms: “‘ Washington 
is no more, and with him has passed the old 
me-too-boss, hat-in-hand, good nigger which 
you and your ilk so dearly love. The radical 
Negro leaders have the ear and the hand of 
the masses. The New Crowd Negroes think 
no more of Moton |[Maj. Robert Moton, head 
of Tuskegee] than they do of you and Cole 
Blease and Vardaman! They look upon him 
as a “good-nigger’ puppet. We are also ap- 
pealing to the manly passions of the Negroes 
and inspiring them to act on the manly and 
lawful principle of self-defense in the pro- 
tection of their homes, their lives, and their 
property.’ As to the charge of Bolshevism 
which Representative Byrnes made, the editors 
had this to say: “We would be glad to see 
a Bolshevik government substituted in the 
South in place of your Bourbon, reactionary, 
vote-stolen, misrepresentative Democratic 
regime. . . . Negroes perform most of the 
service in the South. ... Under the Soviet 
system, their right to vote would be based 
upon their service and not upon race or color.” 
In The Messenger unequivocal demands for 
full equality of every sort, civic, political, 
social, found voice. 


There is an advantage in being doctrinaire 
298 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


familiar to the propagandist social revolu- 
tionary. Something more than doctrinaire 
pungency, however, appeared in The Mes- 
senger. Its editors envisaged the American 
Negro not merely as a member of a closed 
group, isolated and hemmed in, suffering from 
and protesting at injustice, but as a full 
citizen of the world with a part in its economic 
and political conflicts. With the instrument 
of economic determinism at their hand, the 
editors of The Messenger embarked upon a 
raking criticism of attitudes and achievements 
among members of their own race. In a 
sense they carried on Doctor DuBois’s insur- 
gence from the Booker Washington leader- 
ship. Like Doctor DuBois, they set out to 
create new habits of thought among Ameri- 
can Negroes, and, like him, they represented 
an attitude which had grown ripe for expres- 
sion. Their attitude is shared by many 
colored workers disillusioned with the disin- 
genuousness of conservative labor as repre- 
sented in some unions of the American Federa- 
tion of Labor. It is shared by many cultured 
and educated Negroes who find themselves, 
by the terms of race discrimination, fighting 
shoulder to shoulder with the humblest peo- 


ple of color. 
294 


THE NEW NEGRO 


It will be noted that the growth of radical 
sentiment, the determination that race rela- 
tions must be fundamentally altered in the 
United States, was not sudden. Every Negro 
leader of any vitality was forced to be a 
radical from the point of view of the reac- 
tionary groups of white people prepared to 
concede nothing. But the most potent force 
in precipitating radicalism was the entrance 
of the United States into the World War. The 
treatment of the colored soldier by Americans 
in France and in their own country has been 
referred to, as has been the exploitation of 
colored people under the powers conferred 
by “work or fight” laws. Not many Negroes 
became as articulate in their disillusion as the 
editors of The Messenger. But disillusion 
set in that was nation-wide. The firm hold 
which the Republican party had held on the 
gratitude of the mass of colored people began 
to be loosened. The consequence was not 
the creation of any definite new political 
alignments, but rather of an unstable equi- 
librium in which colored people took stock of 
their resources and powers and became in- 
creasingly aware of themselves as a potential 
voting block. In all the disorders that took 


place in 1919 the Negro fought im self-pro- 
5 295 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


tection. He no longer relied on promises 
or on protection even of the federal govern- 
ment. With a Democratic administration in 
power, the Negro had little to hope from 
federal protection during and immediately 
after the World War. In the National Capi- 
tal Jim-Crowism had crept in. Negroes were 
not served in the restaurants of the capital, 
and they found the attitude of the South 
reflected everywhere in Washington. ‘They 
found the Department of Justice being used, 
not to examine into deploraole conditions 
which had brought about race riots, but to 
trace the tenuous connections between 
“Reds,” I. W. W., and the Negro, and to 
proclaim Negro insurrection and radicalism 
to a willing press and a credulous public. 
It is emancipation to distrust others and to 
rely upon oneself. Never, perhaps, in the 
history of the country was there more dis- 
trust of American white men by Negroes 
than after the World War. They had taken 
the measure of the white press and its news- 
distributing organizations. They had seen 
local government crumble and brutality rein 
almost unchecked except by their own bul- 
lets. They had seen the federal government, 


through its one department articulate on 
296 


THE NEW NEGRO 


their affairs, pursue not their oppressors, 
but those who were voicing their heartfelt, 
burning sense of injustice. Something of the 
ethics of real politics was borne in upon the 
American Negro by the treatment accorded 
him. Nowhere, perhaps, was the American 
Negro’s position brought to more dramatic 
focus than before two United States Senators 
in Washington in January, 1920. The Sena- 
tors were conducting a hearing on a resolution 
introduced by one of them, providing for a 
Congressional investigation into mob _ vio- 
lence and lynching in the United States. 
The evidence had been given. Statistics and 
stories of horror lay in the typewritten sheets 
on the table. And the question raised was 
one of jurisdiction. A Senator pomted out 
that the interpretation placed by the courts 
upon the Constitution and _ constitutional 
amendments prevented legislation by states 
infringing personal liberty, but gave the 
federal government no power to act in pro- 
tection of that liberty. The Senators paused. 
A white-haired gentleman rose. His face 
was dark in color as if he had been deeply 
sunburnt. ‘‘Gentlemen,”’ he said, in effect, 
“we come to you deeply aggrieved by in- 


justice. The states have failed to protect 
297 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


us. The federal government professes itself 
powerless. [am an old man of seventy years. 
I have served my country abroad. I have 
passed through almost every phase of govern- 
ment service, and, like many another of my 
race, have given freely of myself. Yet when 
we come to you, in behalf of twelve million 
American Negroes, you tell us there is no 
redress for our wrongs. What are we to 
expect? What are we to hope for?” A 
Senator hastened to express interest, sym- 
pathy, his desire to remedy the conditions 
set down in the documents before him. But 
the questions: “‘What are we to expect? 
What are we to hope for?” remained un- 
answered. 

No intelligent answer to the question put 
by that colored leader has yet been attempt- 
ed. In a sense there is no solution of the 
problems of race relations, even on paper and 
by Northern dilettanti. It is idle to say, give 
the Negro his full rights, when the granting 
of those rights lies with an illiterate white 
electorate at the mercy of brutal and vitu- 
perative editors. Yet approaches to the prob- 
lems have been made. It is coming to be 
realized that the problems of race relations 


can be and must be cleft vertically into the 
298 


THE NEW NEGRO 


constituent problems of democracy: a free 
press serving the people with news, not rumor 
and innuendo; real representation and control 
by the electorate over their elected repre- 
sentatives; proprietorship by the producer 
not only in political fictions, but in the in- 
dustrial processes which depend upon him 
and by which he lives. To this extent the 
“new Negro,” as he is represented in The 
Messenger, has affirmed a significant and 
vital fact: there is no race question inde- 
pendent of other problems of democracy; race 
relations constitute democracy’s most essen- 
tial problem, a problem compounded of all 
the other adjustments which free men are 
called upon to make in forming and main- 
taining social relations. Shameful as was 
the year 1919, with bloodshed, lynching, and 
race riot in the United States, its function 
was still to bring before the attention of the 
nation that a national problem, long unsolved, 
demanded serious attention. A condition 
which had been glossed over, the illegal dis- 
franchisement by methods of terrorism of 
millions of colored Americans, was brought 
boldly to light. The Negro became aware 
of his economic power. The white South 


came to know that in losing Negro labor 
299 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


it was allowing to slip away the very foun- 
dation of its productivity and _ prosperity. 
And in a few communities the lesson had 
already been learned by white Americans 
that their colored neighbors were able and 
were eager to co-operate in establishing decent 
conditions under which white men and men 
of color could live in peace and security. 
Halting steps were taken in 1919 and early 
in 1920 to attack the most obvious of race 
maladjustments. ‘Two resolutions, one in the 
Senate and one in the House of Representa- 
tives, providing for Congressional investiga- 
tion of lynching and race riots, and a number 
of bills which would make lynching a crime 
under federal jurisdiction, showed the in- 
creasing attention directed toward race rela- 
tions. The steps proposed were laudable, 
but would leave the mainsprings of racial 
maladjustment untouched. The experience 
of Atlanta and of Chicago after their race 
riots might well be drawn upon by the nation. 
Here, joint bodies of colored and white men 
met to devise means for making mob violence 
in the streets of their city impossible. In 
Illinois, after the Chicago riots, and in Ar- 
kansas the governors of the states appointed 


commissions to investigate into the causes 
300 


THE NEW NEGRO 


of the disturbances. Communities in the 
South have discovered the advantage in 
forming joint bodies of white and colored 
citizens to deal with matters of local concern. 
In the course of such conferences as have 
been held, both white and colored. men 
have made interesting discoveries about one 
another. White men have been impressed 
with the administrative ability of their colored 
neighbors. Colored men have found, often 
to their astonishment, a body of white men 
eager to give them fair treatment and equal 
opportunity. 

Unfortunately, the growth of local co-opera- 
tion must remain slow. It depends largely 
upon the emancipation of the American peo- 
ple from their newspapers. Little is to be 
expected from the federal government. At 
the hearing in Washington called to inquire 
into the need for investigating lynching and 
race riots, one Senator took occasion to read 
into the record an effusion from the Depart- 
ment of Justice ascribing race riots to the 
activities of ““Reds.”’ Not even the Depart- 
ment of Justice, however, had the temerity 
to connect “Reds” with lynching. So long 
as the complexion of the national legislature 


is determined on the basis of open and flagrant 
301 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


disregard of amendments to the federal Con- 
stitution and violation of their provisious, 
little is to be hoped or expected from that 
source. The Republican party in its endeavor 
to invade the solid Democratic South finds 
it necessary to pander to the South’s color 
psychosis through its “lily-white”’ state or- 
ganizations. In the old political parties there 
is hope neither for the Negro nor for the 
white man who desires a decent approach 
to the problems of race relations. 

The future of race relations, in so far as 
they are not allowed to degenerate into 
violence and irremediable bitterness, would 
seem to lie with labor and with liberal politi- 
cal forces that represent working-class senti- 
ment as the old parties do not and cannot. 
It will be largely on the job and in the labor 
union that the identity of interest of the 
colored worker and the white will be demon- 
strated, probably despite all efforts to main- 
tain the color line in industry by using un- 
organized colored men to break white strikes. 
A tolerable future for the relations between 
white and colored people in the United States 
depends for the most part upon white labor. 
The Negro has found a place in industry. 


He has discovered his strategic importance 
302 


THE NEW NEGRO 


in the contest of capital and labor.” He has 
armed himself for self-defense and is pre- 
pared to fight. Pushing the issue to sporadic 
and embittered clashes between white and 
colored people in the United States involves 
a sort of smoldering civil war that no Ameri- 
can can contemplate with anything but deep 
concern and anxiety. If white unions have 
learned from the northward migration of 
Negroes, they will ignore the propaganda 
in the white press; they will attempt to break 
down the Negro’s distrust of the American 
labor union by giving him the square deal. 

In so far as the South is concerned, con- 
ditions improve as the Negro moves out. 
The migration northward continued after 
the war and was still in full progress early in 
1920. Yet such testimony as that published 
by Mr. T. Arnold Hill, referred to in an earlier 
chapter, indicates little, if any, improvement 
in the treatment of colored people as a direct 
consequence of their services in the war. 
The statement of the Governor of Mississippi 
that “niggers,” not colored men and women, 
were wanted in his state indicates little 
perception of the change of mind and attitude 
that is imperative. One is forced to the 


conclusion that in many parts of the South 
303 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


the Negro can expect decency only when his 
absence has hurt the prosperity of his white 
neighbors. When white planters offer to 
build schools as an inducement to Negroes 
to stay on the farms and to return from 
cities of the North, as they announced late 
in 1919, it is a sign that the beginning of a 
lesson has been learned. The sort of minority 
opinion from which much that is hopeful of 
better race relations emanates is represented 
by a group of professors in Southern uni- 
versities, known as the University Commission 
on Race Questions. Among the institutions 
represented on the commission were the 
Universities of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, 
Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Caro- 
lina, and Texas. The commission published 
four open letters to college men of the South 
in which lynching, education, the migration, 
and reconstruction were treated forcibly and 
with courage. These Southern professors 
pointed out that of fifty-two persons lynched 
in 1914, “only seven—two white and five 
colored—or 13 per cent., were charged with 
the crime against womanhood.’ Lynching 
they termed a “contagious social disease, 
and as such is of deep concern to every 


American citizen and to every lover of civili- 
304 


THE NEW NEGRO 


zation.’ They pointed out ruthlessly that 
*“‘in at least four cases,” of lynching in 1915, 
“it later was discovered that the victims 
of the mob were mnocent of the crime of 
which they were accused.’ In the letter on 
education, dated September 1, 1916, the 
commission pointed out that “inadequate 
provision for the education of the Negro 
is more than an injustice to him; it is an 
injury to the white man” in that it made 
for inefficiency. The letter on the migration, 
written in 1917, made clear that humane 
treatment would be effective in stopping the 
exodus. In the final communication, entitled 
‘““A New Reconstruction,” dated April 26, 
1919, the commission urged “‘a more general 
appreciation of the Negro’s value as a mem- 
ber of the community,” alluded to his services 
in the World War, and spoke of “a splendid 
record of which the Negroes and their white 
friends may be justly proud.” Despite a 
faint suggestion of patronizing tone, the 
communications of these professors represent 
a spirit that, if it is given expression, will 
make it possible for white and black to live 
amicably side by side. But such a point 
of view is too often submerged in the clamor 


of the press. 
20 305 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Little has been said thus far of the need in 
the United States of systematic information on 
matters concerning colored people and their re- 
lation to white people. Investigations conduct- 
ed by men of science have been few. The po- 
litical obstacle to the truth about race and 
race relations weighs upon the universities of 
the North, even. An anthropologist of inter- 
national repute told me late in 1919 that 
he bad for years been endeavoring to stimu- 
late interest in university studies to be under- 
taken among American Negroes, with a view 
to making important racial determinations 
of various sorts. He had about given over 
his efforts because the universities feared to 
antagonize those of their benefactors who had 
preconceived notions on the subject of race 
and race relations. Yet the crying need for 
even elementary facts is evident. White peo- 
ple who call themselves educated are sub- 
ject to the most amazing delusions and 
prejudices with regard to race, and especially 
with regard to their own colored neighbors. 
If there were not this almost universal 
ignorance, colored by the back-stairs gossip 
of newspapers, there would hardly be occasion 
for such a volume as this. The miscon- 


ceptions which are at the root of race prej- 
306 


THE NEW NEGRO 


udice and violence would long since have 
evaporated. But violence and prejudice per- 
petuate themselves by preventing the acquisi- 
tion of any reliable body of fact. It is only 
from a realization on the part of Americans 
white and colored that the poison of color 
hatred affects every phase of American life, 
vitiates politics, is used to intrench exploiting 
classes, to further the plans of self-seeking 
politicians and editors, to foster the intoler- 
ance and parochialism which make for im- 
perialism and wars of aggression, that any 
demand for right can spring. On the face 
of race relations now is written the word 
“menace.” With any but the sort of ap- 
pointees that are to be expected from the 
Republican or Democratic parties, one would 
be tempted to urge as an immediate step the 
creation of a federal department of race 
relations, with a Cabinet officer responsible 
not only for investigating maladjustments 
where they show themselves, but for initiating 
campaigns of the information and education 
of which the body of United States citizens 
are sorely in need. The one experiment in 
that direction undertaken by the federal 
government, the Bureau of Negro Economics 


of the Department of Labor, was permitted 
307 







ATTEN AY ele POAT rs BEN Yd en 
Fah Ne ; - ey 5. 
' Nb) u Been tsk we Pe hee hath Wied sane f ¥ ‘f 
neg it? ee ii i Ose eR we eR aos rh HY ij % y' AR be eRe doit Uf 


eas 


09 ated Ae ve cies yi (Tia RNR al fee Ute Bey 


, Ts yy ay 
ti ei y “® 
Sa i Ve) pk Te 4 cage 
i it a Aan ote are eer hw he a tins SrAting 
i “eg } 7 ty Ne Wid H . 
iy VASE aaa. A ep YSLCA gitar gs Air 
jena iA Pe eee a Wk ae oh . 
4 i i y 
i? be Wee Pe ve ‘His ti | hy 
f te ' pied ' TIas ei} ‘ sim Des yas HY AY y th s 
a haat h ’ Ww 4 > 
/ Ms ie ; 
| / » a's) i) 1h i a? 
' % eg pote nt Wor? 
4) 4 : q f 
Chiral) ita ye og? Bil 4 ne) 
! ee : 4 ' ‘a re | a a) 
viith aon {' A vs 
Bie ' nay 4 
we De er any es fave peal Fish hPuiaut 
Mach aM Le ate» eter ee ae ta! Tt ie at " 
HV 4 ws bl ‘ei 
; pat ; ; 7 eee ae 
é j } Noe aE ‘ uy 
‘ 4 ' ; j : Gy Ls Pi pa 
he vig A BP am on ' i 
ar") tay J oY § i 
: ; ¥ ( / een) 
uA 4 en ‘ds 4 yy f ih ia a) 
Ven'S 1% fh ; NA Ee P,) wa val | 
w RTS oO ta ya oe ee A \ ae 
rey uf rn i hy ene tae A LNT TAS) este A nh 
TRA Aes ~Son Ee NG ROO RA | Der ree Oe 





APPENDIX 


REPORT ON SITUATION AT BOGALUSA, LOUISIANA, BY 
PRESIDENT OF LOUISIANA STATE FEDERATION OF LABOR 


(Transmitted to the National Association for the Advancement of 
Colored People by Frank Morrison, Secretary American Federation 
of Labor, in letter dated February 4, 1920.) 


HE Great Southern Lumber Company who [sic] 

own the lumber mills and the pulp and paper 
mills at Bogalusa, Louisiana, are perhaps the largest 
lumber producers in the United States. They claim 
that the sawmill located at Bogalusa is the largest 
mill in the world. They are also connected with 
several large enterprises; they are interested in the 
large mill located at Virginia, Minnesota, which they 
claim to be the next largest mill in the world. 

About three years ago they put in a very large 
pulp and paper mill at the Bogalusa plant, and about 
that time the workmen at Bogalusa began to try to 
organize. They asked for organizers, and several 
attempts were made to help the people there. About 
this time a young man named Rodgers, an organizer 
for the carpenters and joiners, went to Bogalusa and 
while there was arrested as a suspicious character. 
He was released after getting the news to some of his 
friends in New Orleans; however, they claimed that 
he was a dangerous character and filed charges against 


him in the federal court and while he was in jail at 
311 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Bogalusa, the Bogalusa officers had put dynamite 
caps and fuse in his grip. This grip was produced in 
the federal court as evidence, but their case was so 
flimsy and so crude that the federal authorities dis- 
missed it without trial. Later James Leonard, at 
that time vice-president of the State Federation of 
Labor and an organizer of the A. F. of L., went to 
Bogalusa and was told by the authorities there that 
they would not permit any organizer to come there and 
organize the men. Mr. Leonard left Bogalusa and 
returned to New Orleans; however, this did not stop 
the desire of the workers at Bogalusa, who were in 
touch with the state federation; and later on W. M. 
Donnells was sent there as an organizer for the car- 
penters, and organized the carpenters of the place. 
Then, in rapid succession, the organization of all lines 
followed until we had seventeen local unions at the 
place with a splendid central union. 

Seeing that the men had organized in spite of their 
efforts to thwart it, the company became furious 
and tried to intimidate the members of the locals; 
finding that this would not work they then started 
systematic system of discharging all white union 
men and putting non-union Negroes to work in their 
places and at the same time making a great deal of 
noise and trying to work up a spirit of antagonism 
to the organization of Negroes, even telling the farmers 
and planters that we were trying to organize the Negro 
farm laborers. This forced the hand of labor and a 
campaign of organization was then begun to organize 
the Negroes in the employ of the Great Southern 
Lumber Company. This brought on quite a little 
feeling. The company called a mass-meeting of the 
citizens, where several public men, among them a 
Congressman, made speeches opposing the organization 


of Negroes. Donnells spoke at that meeting and 
312 


APPENDIX 


defended the right of labor to organize. Seeing that the 
men were determined the company then entered into 
an agreement to the effect that they would stop dis- 
charging the union men if they would cease organizing 
Negroes. ‘This arrangement was made with the under- 
standing that no union man should be discriminated 
against or prejudiced in any way because of his mem- 
bership in a union. This arrangement had not been 
made thirty days when the company immediately 
started discharging both white and colored union men, 
and issued an ultimatum from Mr. W. S. Sullivan, 
the vice-president and general manager of the plant, 
that he would not recognize any union man and that 
he would not meet nor confer with any one repre- 
senting union labor and instructed his office to so 
inform Donnells and others. 

This agreement was made in April of 1919, and from 
that time on things happened fast at Bogalusa. Mr. 
Sullivan, who is vice-president of the Great Southern 
Lumber Company, is also mayor of the town of Bo- 
galusa. He then placed about thirteen of his hench- 
men that had not joined labor on the police force of 
the town. They were augmented by a number of 
deputies appointed by the sheriff of the parish, and then 
began a reign of terror in the town. 

They tried to get rid of all the leaders by terrorizing 
them and by offering them bribes to leave the place. 
Finding this would not work, they sent their employ- 
ment man to Chicago and other cities to secure three 
thousand Negroes, with the intent of placing non- 
union Negroes in the industries there and forcing the 
union men to leave. They failed to get any men in 
Chicago; I was informed by reliable parties in Chicago 
that they did not offer sufficient wages and that the men 
were informed that no labor trouble existed. How- 


ever, the men knew that they were wanted as strike- 
. 3138 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


breakers and would not go. On failing to get men, 
they immediately began arresting men, both black and 
white, on all kinds of trumped-up charges and taking 
them to the county seat about twelve miles away. 
The automobiles furnished the police and deputy 
sheriffs were used for the purpose of taking the men 
to the county seat, but the men when discharged for 
lack of evidence had to get back to Bogalusa any way 
they could. In addition to this, several men were 
beaten by these same gunmen; others were ordered 
to leave, while some of them were offered bribes to 
leave. 

Previous to this, a committee had been appointed, 
two by the company and two by the men, to investigate 
wages and working conditions in the lumber industry 
throughout the state and east Texas and western 
Alabama and Mississippi. This committee reported 
that the Great Southern Lumber Company was paying 
less wages than any mill west of the Mississippi River. 
One of the men representing the company was a sawyer, 
who had at that time never joined the union. However, 
when he was selected by the company to represent, 
he accepted and when the report was made he was 
accused by the company of not making a fair report. 
He then joined the Sawyers’ Union and was soon 
made president of the union. They then tried to 
induce him to leave. He owned his own home in the 
town and also a small farm just outside of the city. 
He was told by the henchmen of the company that he 
had better sell his property and leave the place. He 
refused to do this, and while attending a meeting he 
was called from the hall, when seven of the gunmen 
attacked him, placed him in an automobile, and ran 
him five miles out of town, where they took him out 
of the car and there proceeded to beat him into an 


almost unconscious condition. They then dictated 
314 


APPENDIX 


a letter which they compelled him to write to his wife, 
telling her to sell all their property and leave at once, 
as he was not coming back. This man, whose name is 
Ed. O'Bryan, was then taken to a station on the 
Northeastern Railroad and placed on the car bound 
for New Orleans, and was told by the gunmen that 
they were the Department of Justice agents, and that 
he was under arrest by the federal authorities as an 
I. W. W. agitator. They had, in the mean time, 
painted a sign on the man’s back which read “JI am an 
I. W. W.,” and when placed on the train they found 
Brother Donnells on the same train. They also told 
him that both he and O’Bryan were under arrest by 
the federal authorities as I. W. W. agitators. They 
held guns on both of them, and would not allow them 
to speak to each other. At the first station out of 
New Orleans, two of the gunmen got off the car while 
one stayed on. On reaching the yards in the city, 
this man also got off and left O’Bryan and Donnells 
alone. 

After having O’Bryan’s wounds treated, they went 
to the office of the Superintendent of the Department 
of Justice and filed complaints from which nothing 
has yet been heard. 

The president of the Colored Timber Workers’ Union 
was another one they offered a small sum of money 
to leave and sell his property. He owned a home and 
some live stock in the place, all told valued at about 
thirty-five hundred. They offered him two thousand 
to sell this property and leave. He refused to do so. 
They went that night to his house and shot it to pieces, 
and searched for him. However, he had told the 
white labor people of the offer to leave and they had 
gotten him away.. When they could not find him, 
they then blamed the white labor people for getting 


him away and then gave out a statement to the press 
315 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


that Lum Williams and another labor sympathizer 
had paraded the Negro Dacus up and down the street 
while they were heavily armed, and had defied the 
authorities to arrest him. I am informed by a number 
of people, who are not members of labor, that this 
is a false statement, as nothing of the kind was done, 
and the gunmen who claimed to have a warrant for 
the arrest of Dacus had nothing but a trumped-up 
charge. That was their excuse for going to Lum 
Williams’s place on the following day where they mur- 
dered Williams, who was president of the Central 
Trades Council, together with three others. The claim 
of the gunmen that the union men had arms in the 
building was untrue, as there was not a gun in the 
building. They drove up in their automobiles and 
without warning began to shoot. Williams was the 
first to appear at the door where he was shot dead, 
without a word being spoken by either side. Two 
other men, who were in his office at the time, were shot 
down, and the bodies of the three men fell one on top 
of the other in the doorway. The other men attempted 
to leave the building by the back door where two of 
them were shot down while coming out with their 
hands above their heads; the only shot fired by any 
man connected with the labor people in any way 
was fired by a young brother of Lum Williams who 
shot Captain LeBlanc in the shoulder with a .22-caliber 
rifle, after he had shot his brother to death. This 
Captain LeBlanc was a returned soldier and was 
placed in command of the gunmen in Bogalusa. One 
of the men wounded at the back door of the building | 
where the killing occurred was taken to the sanitarium © 
where he died three days later, but no one was allowed 
to see him while he was alive. ; 

Young Williams was arrested immediately and 
charged with shooting with intent to kill, while the 

316 


APPENDIX 


thirteen gunmen, who did the murder, were not arrested 
until three weeks later, when the grand jury took 
action and bound them over to await the final action 
of the regular session of the grand jury in May. 
They were immediately released on a bond of forty 
thousand dollars each and have returned to Bogalusa 
where they are still armed and defying the law of the 
state. 

They have been continually arresting Negroes for 
vagrancy and placing them in the city jail. It seems 
that a raid is made each night in the section of the 
town where the Negroes live and all that can be found 
are rounded up and placed in jail charged with vagrancy. 
In the morning the employment manager of the Great 
Southern Lumber Company goes to the jail and takes 
them before the city court where they are fined as 
vagrants and turned over to the lumber company 
under the guard of the gunmen where they are made 
to work out this fine. There is now an old Negro 
in the hospital at New Orleans whom they went to 
see one night, and ordered to be at the mill at work 
next day. ‘The old man was not able to work, and 
was also sick at the time. They went back the next 
night and beat the old man almost to death and broke 
both of his arms between the wrist and elbow. This 
old man was taken from the hospital and went to the 
county seat and appeared before the grand jury and 
the papers made a big thing of it and said we were 
trying to stir up race trouble. The State Federation 
has taken the matter up with labor throughout the 
state and we intend to fight the thing to a finish. 

However, we are badly handicapped for funds to 
fight the combined forces of the entire lumber industry; 
as they have organized an organization to fight us 
and now have a man named Boyd, who was editor of 


The Lumbermen’s Journal, traveling through the 
317 


THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA 


Southern lumber states forming local organizations 
with the sole purpose of defending the Great Southern 
Lumber Company and fighting any attempt on the 
part of labor to organize the lumber industry in the 
South. I have it from reliable sources that they have 
succeeded in lining up the hardwood-lumber people 
also in this anti-union organization. They are holding 
meetings in all the towns in the Southern lumber 
states. 

We have employed the Hon. Amos L. Ponder as an 
attorney to defend young Williams for the shooting 
and to prosecute the thirteen gunmen. We are having 
some investigating done and hope to be able to bring 
them to justice along with those who are responsible 
for the many outrages against humanity and justice. 
However, they are still terrorizing the people that 
live in Bogalusa, and just last week Brother Donnelly 
was on his way, in company with Brother Donnells, 
to Bogalusa to hold a meeting. Brother Donnelly 
is now president of the central body at that place. 
On arriving at the depot in New Orleans one of the 
gunmen met them there and told Donnells that if he 
went to Bogalusa he would be murdered, and made 
several threats. They had him arrested on two 
charges—one for threatening to kill and one for carry- 
ing concealed weapons. He was released on bond 
in each case and, no doubt, no effort will ever be made 
to have him appear for trial in New Orleans. 

The union men asked the Governor of the state to 
have federal troops sent to Bogalusa, which he did, 
and which no doubt prevented bloodshed, as it seemed 
that the Southern Lumber Company had determined to 
get rid of all members of labor . . . Some of the 
citizens had become aroused over the matter, on one 
side or the other, till it looked as though a serious 


situation had been reached, and should the troops 
318 


APPENDIX 


be taken away and the gunmen begin again their 
reign of terror, it is almost certain that the citizens 
will take a hand in the affair. Some of them are 
friendly to labor while some of them are aiding the 
gunmen in every way they can. The citizens of 
the parish have requested that marshall law [martial 
law] be declared, but at present under that au- 
thority of the constitution governing such matters, 
the Governor cannot declare the parish under marshall 
law [martial law] as the authorities there are now 
keeping order. It seems this is being done to assist 
the lumber company in its effort to have the soldiers 
removed, as Sullivan is trying to get the soldiers away 
from there until such time as we are assured that the 
local civil authorities will see that the laws are enforced 
and justice can be had. 

This report does not cover all details of the case, 
but will give you some idea of the conditions that 
prevail in Bogalusa, and in the entire Southern lumber 
belt. This will happen anywhere in the Southern 
belt if they get away with it at Bogalusa, for they are 
the one industry in this country that have always 
resisted organization to the finish. 

[Signed] T. J. Gresr, 
President Louisiana State Federation of Labor 


THE END 





A 5 
ny ghee i 








































‘| 
SAG TaN ree 
LATS Fl aya Te iA be 
That 7 b igh) AY ee a 7 i a mai ut ay hae My: fy iis, ig vy m. ye 
WER eA 38 sai) faired mene te x 
| ‘ Me : iy Aid sale bsg . bait Lhe ed Mey eens 
As , Ad 4 i 14 , - < + Wed e h *‘ 1% a Py: 
Sie Aj PTO rapes ay ‘TAN, hth ADP ne 
¥ a A Ea A i, 
| : Vip i f she hog ; ners hs es sf 
| Hd vee IN a vAtincnt ce hs 
= 4 ; eee ery, | 
By | oY ne sf Aaa ba eo bebe $ : iy “ih ap hans 
i a * ae 7 awit Peal f Ath Ke ; 4 dk lity i ’ 
bal. f L2N AES Bhs BE UR Li Va Mae ie, ait rei cans, 
ts hen BA Hah a wt 
; eae vy ts Git: wet TA ba 
vt \ ' »' . 
/ ‘ de * : ay ae po bit ml 


‘ oad cf wv Me i as Ae rie | ey, 
ts ie ie OR ay eh te HR a aa Se a: ihe ey y 





ud eee Le cP i Epa i 
ans Nee Bot aa Cat LA ik ae ‘3 bs; Mitt ahs kT 
j ‘ ° P U mY 4 b 
Ik CMe) Letme ee arate. oh be Me Hinihaaan ft} r 
.. : ; i ee! ie by ads ia ay : a) e u i ? git 4 
; Pee ANCE SLES UP ie EE ere a Rey Ce Hae unl hone 
d ‘ | | 5 
, ak ita eh (ike el 


ath. iy ante te s oa eth « 
ii) NMAC? Ltda Laie UY aa 











4 oY ey rt “ i 
iva > ee TSO ‘ i‘. he | 
(iy MOOR RSE Seat h ay 73 Pan MAL he art 
i f ke 5 ; 
CT ee TNE aad 
“fp ' . : 
i Pe a Se Oa Eee CW} Weed AY Eat ee biegiad 
k ¢ a } 
; , h ‘ ‘ Mes + 
; ; i : i ‘ ‘ 
: : Lay } j 4 sé { , ‘ at TE J ik is Vey , 
Ms io Ae , j aoa 
u , % Bald A 4 
P ‘ ; a ‘ Ni ft iy re Pike rl y fia } ted ur 
4 
H et Pat a. 4 
; SP by A 4” yey 
pie re Ae Pata han ie r\t) et 
if P . y| ° ba 
: I é " ly fe re ate 
" 7 . A . ee {° a hone i 
, = i j seen oe (td avy eect oe } ib 
a? a , ‘ 
a fa yl tbe e Ay aA an * +4) “ey 403.7 Panny 
. hy ret ® yn RD ' ¥ SHY mn et ry aS aie sisi fe a 
; f - a n ¥ ’ : 
Pr ty oF 
f t, ’ 
a. 
4 
Tt: 
gate! 
hay 
iy 
Hea tipy. § 
«-} ‘ 
yen 
ag i 
ob | 
as, 
, © at 
Aya? Ny 
wis + 
7 yes ; 
y AS / < 
tT n 
vey le ME Rte 
y ail ek 
f oy J 
ah 
\ 
re a ‘ 
re: he 
1 aa 
Pa, h | 
Mg SS 
| Se i 
= Ps, #7) 
Ree ei 
oe eat 
: h 








